At sunset, the farm wasn't quite asleep... nor was it completely awake. It was in that strange, in between place where nightmares of both dreams and reality could still assault the mind from either side of the veil of sleep. The dozens of paid laborers that worked in the House had already gone home, glad to be free of the place for another night. Tonight they had walked a little faster, and whispered a little more softly among themselves as they passed the gates. Some of them declared that they wouldn't come back. They said that Ellis had gone too far today... that there would be repercussions from what Percy had done at the hanging. The city might have something to say about it... or the Order Illumitat... or, worst of all... the slaves themselves. Was that faint gleam of vengeance and revolt in the slaves eyes real... or imagined? Was it safe to stay and find out?

Grady's overseers kept a careful watch on the slave quarters tonight. Any slave that so much as stepped out into the moonlight to relieve himself was locked in the sights of an overseer's bow until the task was done. They weren't expecting any trouble tonight... but, as Grady always said, trouble wasn't always kind enough to give warning before it showed up on one's doorstep.

The overseers and guards that weren't on duty were told to be ready for anything. That meant that they were only HALF as drunk as they usually were by sunset. In honor of the day's festivities, Master Percy had purchased two kegs of ale from town. His cabin had already drawn a joyous crowd when Master Ellis summoned Percy to the house for some mysterious business... but the party most certainly went on without him. The more the night went on, the more the men convinced themselves that 'being ready' didn't necessarily mean being sober at all... that they could fight and use a whip just as well with crossed eyes and numb fingers than they could with a clear head.

The slaves had huddled themselves in their cabins to pray for deliverance. Or at least forgetfulness. Images of the morning's horror still haunted them. Images and sounds. The howling dogs... the screaming girl. Master Percy's laughter. Grown men were sickened to the point that they could not eat for the rest of the day. Now they sat quietly... with stomachs empty yet not a single pang of hunger. Some talked among themselves. Some whispered of Ghan's last words. Some wrestled with the memories as they tried to sleep. Others just lay on their backs and stared silently up at nothing.

Everyone... overseer and slave alike... gasped when the escape horn sounded.

It couldn't be.

Not another escape. Not after this morning.

It simply could NOT be.

The overseers on guard converged on the slave quarters and took a rapid count. They accounted for everyone, except for those they had seen Grady take to the House. Had one of the House slaves escaped?

Meanwhile, drunks scattered from Master Percy's cabin like fleeing insects. They headed for the stables... and the House... and the slave quarters... anywhere that they could claim readiness despite the heavy stench of ale on their breaths. The few that were too drunk to move simply passed out where they lay... hoping that no one came looking for them.

Harriek and his hounds exploded out of the kennel like a hellstorm. Snarling beasts tore across the fields in search of a trail that could be followed to another nice meal. Guards and overseers followed at a respectable distance. No one wanted to get close to the dogs or their keeper. Not after this morning. The hounds came across a few faint traces of something, and the hunt was on.

And, in the ensuing chaos, Master Percival snuck away from the House and returned to his cabin.

"...no way they'll ever catch that boy..." he grumbled to himself as he kicked his own cabin door open. "No need for ME to go out there and waste my time! I've got BETTER things to do! MAKE YOURSELVES COMFORTABLE, LADIES!"

Bethsaida and Selie were gagged and bound with thick ropes. Percy carried Selie over his shoulder, and when he entered the cabin, he flung her to the ground like a sack of feed. Bethsaida could barely walk with the rope binding her ankles, so Percival simply shoved her and she quickly found her own way to the floor.

Percy lived in an overseer's cabin... one of a few small wooden structures between the fields and the slave quarters. Percy's cabin was larger than the others, and was actually divided into ROOMS rather than being just one big open space. And unlike the servants, Percy had an actual bed, not a cot or a thin mattress on the floor. He had furniture: a couch in front of the fireplace. A table and chairs. Even an old desk that got no use whatsoever. There were three people passed out in the room. Bethsaida recognized them all. One was an overseer, and the other two were paid laborers from the house. All were sound asleep.

Bethsaida ended up on the floor by the desk. Her bonds were to tight to wiggle out of... she'd been trying since the second Percy had tied them up. All she'd gotten for her trouble was bloody wrists.

"mmmm!" she moaned into the gag. "mmmmmm!"

Selie heard her. The girl's eyes were red from crying... her limbs trembling with fear. She looked from Percy to Bethsaida and back again.... using her eyes to ask what Master Percy was going to do to them. Was he going to feed them to animals like he had done with Tenna?

Bethsaida shook her head. She took a few deep breaths, and then tried again to slip her hands out of the ropes. She failed.

"OH, YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!" Percy roared. He had checked this ale supply and found that one of the kegs was empty and he other as only a third full. Most of the culprits were gone... those that remained were unconscious in various parts of the cabin. "HIRK! HIIIIRRRRK!!!"

"WHAT!" Someone called from the bedroom. Bethsaida heard footsteps, and then Percy's friend Hirk leaned into the room. "oh."

"What happened to my ALE!" Percy demanded.

"Hell, what do ya THINK happened to it!" Hirk said with a mischievous smile. His face was flushed, and his words were slightly slurred. "We DRANK it! Figured Ellis would have you locked away all night... more ale for US! Then the horn sounded and everybody cleared out... 'cept for those three. I figured when you got back we could drag 'em into the woods and leave 'em like we did to Chase that time! HA! LOVE to see the expressions on their faces-"

"Oh, I think we can do better than that for tonight's entertainment-" Percy nudged Bethsaida with his boot.

"MMMMMMMMMM-"

He kicked her in the stomach to shut her up.

"Heeeey..." Hirk said, his drunken smile widening. He glanced at Selie. Bethsaida didn't like the look in his eyes. "These are the witch-woman's kids, ain't they?"

"Not any more," said Percy. "Father gave 'em to me!"

"Yeah, sure he did."

"He DID! Grady whipped that old bitch to death right in front of 'em! You shoulda seen it!"

"Really?"

"Yes! She had this look on her face when she keeled over...." Percy grimaced and stuck out his tongue.

"HA! HAHA!"

"Yeah... but then the weird one broke loose and got away."

"The freak? The skinny kid!? THATS who the horn was for?"

"Who woulda thought the freak could run that fast."

"Hell, Harriek'll catch 'im! Those hounds o' his-"

"No,I don't think so," said Percival. "I think that's the last we seen of that boy. Gods, I hope so. But that's okay... we GOT the ones we want!"

"Heh, heh... too bad everybody else is out chasin' slaves."

"Grady won't keep 'em out there for long," said Percival. "He knows a waste of time when he sees it, no matter what father says. Chase and the others'll be back soon. Hell, Chase is probably sneakin' off right now."

"We gonna wait for 'em?"

"Are you crazy? Get these three ingrates outta my house, Hirk... then me and you will sample the entertainment..."

Hirk grabbed the drunks one at a time and unceremoniously dumped them outside. While Hirk cleared the room, Percy knelt down beside Bethsaida. He hadn't bothered to replace her shirt, so her chest was still exposed. Percy touched her breasts, and Bethsaida tried to pull away, he slapped her. The slap didn't hurt. But even if it did, she couldn't have cried out with the gag in her mouth. Bethsaida wished she could spit in Percy's face, but the gag prevented that as well.

"mmmm!" Selie moaned as Percival's slap rang out on her sister's skin.

Bethsaida's eyes bored holes in Percy's drunken face. She didn't look away. She wasn't going to look away.

"You're a feisty one," said Percy. He touched her again... tracing his fingers around the curves of Bethsaida's breasts as he talked. "I don't know what that witch-woman was feedin' you... but YOU developed quite nice, I think. Nice, brown skin... hardly a scar on ya. Grady shoulda beat THAT secret outta her-"

"MMMMMMMMMMM!!!" Bethsaida screamed in rage. With arms and legs bound, there was on way she could fight. Instead, she moved back and wiggled her way across the floor... until her back hit the wall. Then there was nowhere else to go.

"Uh-huh," said Percy. He calmly stood up, walked over to her, and knelt down before her again. "A bit of advice, girl... save your strength. You'll need it. You go passin' out on us, then the boys is likely to just get mad. You don't want that-"

"Hey, look who I found creepin' around!" Hirk announced as he and Chase came in.

"Heh!" Percy turned his head to greet Chase... but the instant his eyes were off of Bethsaida, she lifted her legs and bent her knees... bringing her bound feet up as far as she could. Then, before anyone could warn him, she kicked Master Percy squarely in the side of his head. The heels of her feet caught him on the jaw-

-CRACK!-

"AAAAGHF-" The kick knocked Percy off balance. He fell backwards and hit the floor. He scrambled to his feet... hit the floor again... stood up once more and spat out two bloody teeth... then nearly fell down yet again. Chase grabbed him and held him steady until the dizziness cleared.

Hirk shoved past Percy and back-handed Bethsaida across the face. He hit a lot harder than Percy. All of Bethsaida's senses merged together into one bright blur, and when the world returned to normal, she felt blood running down her throbbing face. And her neck hurt.

She heard Selie screaming on the other side of the room. She looked for her, but Hirk was standing in her way. He grabbed Bethsaida by the throat and drew back his huge fist. He was looking at her face, expecting her to close her eyes. She didn't. Just as his fist began to move, Percy grabbed his arm.

"Eaaasy now," said Percy. His jaw was swollen and bruised from its encounter with Bethsaida's feet. "Hold on a minute there, Hirk."

"Hold on!? She damn near kicked you across the farm!"

"Yeah... but you think she cares about you hittin' her?" said Percy. "Look at her eyes... she'd just as soon let you beat her to death. Hell, she probably WANTS you to! But I know something she DON'T want..."

Percy grabbed Selie and pulled her to her feet. He held the girl by the hair and yanked it violently as he spoke.

"Didn't your mamma tell you what happens to girls who fight!?" he hissed. "Yeah... I know you know. Well if you fight back again, it ain't gonna happen to YOU...its gonna happen to your SISTER!"

"MMMM!" Selie's high-pitched scream was muffled by the gag... but the terror came through loud and clear.

"So whatcha gonna do," Percy continued. "You gonna be like your freak brother and look out for yourself... or you gonna keep your sister in once piece by doin' what we say!"

Bethsaida glared at Percy, but made no attempt to speak or move.

"Hirk-" Percy flung Bethsaida's sister into Hirk's waiting grasp. "Break something. I don't care what, just make it hurt."

"MMMMMMM!" Bethsaida screamed. "MMMMMMM!!!"

"What was that?" Percy cupped his hand next to his ear and smiled. "You say something?"

"MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!"

"Hey, boys, I think she says she's gonna be a good girl now. Is that what you heard?"

"Sounded like it to me," said Chase.

"Lets find out if she means it..." Percy took Chase's knife and knelt down by Bethsaida once again.

"Careful," Hirk warned. "She'll take your head off."

"No she won't," Percy said with a smile. Bethsaida tried not to react when he touched her again. His fingers on her skin gave her the chills. She wanted to kick him... bite him... scratch him... anything to get his hands off of her.

But then they would hurt Selie.

So she did nothing while Master Percy molested her. Then, almost as an afterthought, he used Chase's knife to cut the gag.

"That's better," said Percy. He smiled at her. Her eyes shot fire back at him. "Want to spit in my face?" Percy teased her. He leaned in closer. "Go ahead. You go right ahead and do it. Right here... c'mon... spit on me, I dare ya!"

Bethsaida didn't want to spit on him. She wanted to rip his skin off with her teeth. But she didn't.

"That's right," said Percy. "You keep your place and your sister'll be in one piece come dawn. You will too... maybe. You ever been with a man before, girl?"

Bethsaida just stared at him.

"Answer me," Percy said sternly.

Bethsaida shook her head.

"See... this is for the best, then. The three of us'll get ya all broke in before the rest of the boy's get here. Then after tonight... after we're done... there won't be any problems next time somebody wants somethin' from ya. You'll be right as rain and ready to go. Ain't that right boys!"

"Who goes first!" Chase replied.

"Who the hell do you THINK goes first!" said Percy. "You don't think I hauled 'em all the way out here so I can have SECONDS, do you? As a matter of fact... YOU fellas don't even get to watch!"

"Awww, c'mon!"

Percy lifted Bethsaida from the floor and carried her into his bedroom... where he paused to kick the door closed and throw her onto the bed. Chase cut the ropes away from her arms and feet... and then sliced her pants away, leaving her naked. Bethsaida curled up into a ball on the bed. The mattress was soft and comfortable, but she never even felt it. She may as well have been laying on cold, rough stone. She watched as Percy put the knife on the dresser... well out of Bethsaida's reach. Master Percy may have been drunk, but he wasn't stupid. Not THAT stupid.

"You may as well un-curl yourself, girl," he said as he pulled off his shirt. His pale chest was hairy... like one of Harriek's dogs. He was a beast. "I said STRAIGHTEN OUT!" he shouted.

Bethsaida hesitated, then rolled over onto her back... with her legs straight out and her fists clenched at her sides. For some reason, Percy found her position humorous.

"HA! It won't work THAT way, girl! But don't worry... you'll figure it out soon enough! Here..." Percy removed his belt and tied it around Bethsaida's left ankle. He tied the other end to a bedpost. He grabbed her right ankle and forced her legs apart. Bethsaida fought him for a moment, but then she remembered Selie. She let him do what he wanted. Percy took off his pants and crawled onto the bed.

"Hey, PERCY!" Chase called from the other room.

"WHAT, DAMMIT!"

"What do we do with this other one in here!?"

"Just twist her arm every once in a while! As a reminder!"

"Oh, okay!"

"AND SHUT UP!"

Bethsaida heard Hirk laugh... and then Selie yelping in pain as the big man did what Percy told him.

"...selie..." Bethsaida whispered. She closed her eyes to hold the tears in, then she felt Percy's breath in her ear.

"That's a good girl," he said as he lay on top of her. "See there... I knew you wasn't gonna be like your brother..."

Percy made a sudden movement. And, despite her best efforts not to, Bethsaida screamed as he took her.

---

It went on for hours.

Master Percy was the first, but Hirk and the overseer Chase came after him. And while Hirk was nearly crushing her with his bulk, Bethsaida heard more men come in from outside. There was laughing and shouting... muffled screams from Selie... arguments about who would be next to bed the willing slave girl that Percy had tied up in his room. They decided their place in line with drinking games and arm-wrestling contests and a dozen other ridiculous ways. But every time someone new knocked on the door of Percy's cabin, they would argue some more and decide the whole thing all over again. Eventually their shouting... and the frenzied grunting of whoever happened to be on top of her at the moment...drowned out what little Bethsaida could hear of her sister. She didn't even know of Selie was still alive. Had they tossed her into a corner and forgotten about her? Or had they stretched her out on the floor practice on her that they were waiting in line to do to Bethsaida?

Did it matter? No. No, because there was nothing that Bethsaida could do. Nothing but lay there and let the men have their way with her body, while her mind drifted further and further away from what surely must be a nightmare. She felt Master Percy because he was the first. The first tonight... the first ever. She felt the next few because her body was still raw and bleeding.... but eventually each man just became more grunting, thrusting pain heaped onto a soul that had already borne too much. And every time the door opened and closed... every time the bed creaked and she felt someone's hands upon her, another piece of that soul withered.

Bethsaida said nothing as the men came one after another. Even her sobs were silent. Her screams were just thoughts that never reached her lips. Even when the men slapped her and ordered her to moan or beg or other nonsense.... she just lay there and cried.

Master Percy came to her several times.... throwing his bestial self onto the bed with increasing vigor as the night wore on. By the third time, his breath had stopped reeking of ale, and instead taken on the full stench of the corn liquor that Bethsaida sometimes smelled around the House. Some of the guards must have brought it with them when their shift was over. Percy forced the sickening smell into her mouth as he pressed his lips against hers in some brutal semblance of a kiss. Yes, he wanted to kiss her now. He dug his fingers into the wounds on her back to make her scream, and then his tongue was in her mouth. It was all Bethsaida could do not to bite the probing lump of warm flesh off. Instead, she just wept and waited for him to finish. Waited for the next person in whatever new order they had assumed outside.

Eventually, even the tears stopped. Bethsaida wasn't even there any more. One at a time, her senses shut down. Her skin had grown mercifully numb hours... hours?... ago... and her vision became blurred from the dried tears and... blood? From where? Had they cut her? She couldn't remember. All that remained was the stench of man after man after man... and the sounds they made as they raped her.

It was then that she heard some sort of disturbance in the other room. The men were shouting at each other. No... laughing. Cheering? The liquor in their stomachs made all those sounds seem the same. There was scuffling... and a loud bang, as if a heavy piece of furniture had been thrown across the room.

A fight?

Were they fighting over her now?

Bethsaida was so far gone that she almost laughed. She actually smiled... hoping that at least some of them would kill themselves before they got to her again.

But after the loud sound, there was a long silence. The man who was with her... was it Percy again?... finished and went outside. More shouting. After a while, someone else came in, and the things went on much as they had before. Only quieter.

Shortly after that, the last of Bethsaida's senses went numb... and she was shivering in a very dark, very cold place. It was the place where her soul used to live. She was curled around the last, flickering ember of it... hugging it... protecting it from the nightmare that had slaughtered all but this one, final fragment. She held it close, and stayed there in the darkness with it for a long, long, long time...

---

Bethsaida opened her eyes and was greeted with blackness. The oil lamp in the bedroom had gone out, but the moonlight through the window held the darkness at just this side of absolute.

She could see. Barely. A few black shapes in the nearly-black room. The bedposts. The dresser against the wall. The arm of the man who... when his turn was done... was so drunk that he couldn't make it out of the room and had instead passed out on the floor with one hand reaching up... resting on her lower thigh.

Bethsaida tried to pull her leg away. The man's grip was nonexistent... but so was her strength. Just flexing the muscle to move made her entire pelvis hurt. That, in turn, sent sharp stabs of pain up her back and back down her other leg. Fortunately, she was still mostly numb, else the pain would have returned her to the darkness.

She tried again. Her leg moved. The hand resting on it slid off of the bed and slapped its owner in the face. The man mumbled and rolled over on the floor. He started snoring.

Bethsaida's other leg had been tied to the bedpost with Percy's belt. The belt was gone, but her ankle was swollen and bloody where it had been. It didn't matter... MOST of her was swollen and bloody. Bethsaida sat at the edge of the bed and waited for her mind to return. There were no thoughts in her head... only flashes of pain.

She waited.

Listening to the man on the floor snore... she waited.

Her first thought was of Michael. She wondered if her brother had gotten away. Was he still out there? Would he come back... for her? For Selie?

No. No, Michael was gone. He could have helped them... he could have saved them... but he ran away instead. He wasn't coming back. He didn't care enough to save them, so he didn't care enough to come back.

She had taken Grady's whip for him. At the Hanging Tree, she was going to die for him. To protect him. To save him.

But when the time came for him to save THEM... he ran.

Bethsaida cried in the darkness, realizing that dear Michael... her one and only brother whom she loved with all her heart... had left them behind. She cried silently, letting not even a sob pass her lips.

And then... as if an invisible spirit had tapped her on the shoulder... she remembered.

Selie.

Selie was out there.

Bethsaida wiped her tears on her hand and glanced at the man on the floor. She got up... taking almost a minute to steady herself... and crept over to him. He was by the window, and she could see him a little better in the moonlight when she got close. She saw that he was naked. She saw that it was Master Percy... passed out literally in a pool of his own vomit.

But even then, his thin lips bore a satisfied smile. He continued to snore peacefully while she looked around the room.

His knife was still on the dresser.

Without thinking, Bethsaida took it. It was heavy.

Holding the knife in her hand, she turned to Percy... and then to the door... and then back to Percy.

Then back to the door. She tip-toed across the rough wooden floor and grasped the latch. The metal was cold in her hand. She held it... hesitating... until it was the same temperature as her palm. Then she pushed it down and pulled the door open-

FWUMP!

Bethsaida stifled a scream as a man fell into the room. The drunken overseer had passed out leaning against the door, and when she'd unlatched it, his weight had pushed it open. He fell at her feet. His eyes were closed. His mouth was open. He wasn't snoring, but he was breathing deeply and heavily... with one hand resting on his whip.

He wasn't the only one in the room. There were more...overseers, guards, and laborers... all drunk and naked or nearly so. All in various stages of unconsciousness. Some snored. Some didn't. None of them reacted to the sound of the door opening or of the one overseer hitting the floor.

Bethsaida crept into the room... searching the darkness for Selie. The lamp in this room hadn't gone out, but the old wick was burnt so low that it was less than useful. She carefully crossed the room to the desk and turned the lamp up.

The room brightened, but only a little. She could see the men better now. One on the couch. Three on the floor. One even passed out sitting upright in a chair. She recognized them all from the farm, but knew none of their names. Chase wasn't there. But Hirk was. Completely naked, Hirk had passed out on top of the remains of the kitchen table. The table's legs were in splinters all around him... obviously incapable of supporting his bulk when he decided to make the table into a bed.

But she still couldn't see Selie.

Bethsaida wanted to call out for her sister, but she didn't dare.

Did she?

"...selie..." she whispered.

There was no reply. Not from her sister, nor from the sleeping beasts in the room.

"...selie..." she repeated a little louder.

One of the men smacked his lips and mumbled something about a goat... talking nonsense in his sleep.

Had they taken Selie somewhere? Where? Why?

Bethsaida tried to remember the last time she had heard Selie's muffled cries. When was it?

The shouting. The crash. She had heard Selie then.... during the fight.

But it wasn't a fight. It was men cheering and applauding as... as...

Slowly, Bethsaida turned to where Hirk lay. And there was Selie... her tiny form crushed under his huge body... the gag still in her mouth.

They had said she would be okay if Bethsaida let them do things to her.

They promised they would leave Selie alone.

They lied.

Their lust had gotten the better of them, and, like foxes guarding the hen-house, they had turned their hunger loose on their innocent hostage. They had stripped her and thrown her onto the table to rape her just as they had done to Bethsaida. And when it was Hirk's turn... when he leaned his weight onto the table, it gave way beneath them both. The table hit the floor, with Hirk on top of it... and Selie underneath him.

The girl's gag was bloody from where her crushed lungs forced blood back up into her throat. Was she already dead then? Or did she live long enough to drown in her own blood? She probably lived...and her struggles only urged Hirk on... gave new fire to his drunken lust. He finished his deed and fell asleep right where he lay... on top of Bethsaida's dead sister.

And Percy had come out, seen what happened, and left them there.... thinking it a raucous joke to laugh at in the morning.

A joke.

Selie was dead. And it was a joke. Hirk would awaken on top of a dead girl, and it would be funny and they would all laugh and laugh and laugh...

Funny.

Bethsaida knelt down beside Hirk's unconscious form and reached out to touch the tiny dead face peeking out from under his meaty shoulder. Bethsaida touched her sister's cold skin...

...and that last tiny spark of Bethsaida's soul winked out.

She looked down at the knife in her hand. She looked at the front door.

Then back at the knife.

Then at the six men passed out in the room.

Then back at the door.

Bethsaida stood up and walked over to the man who has passed out in the chair. He was an overseer. His black whip was coiled up under the chair like a snake. Bethsaida ran her hand through his sandy blonde lice-infested hair...

"...mmmm, stop playin around..." he slurred as he eased his head back.

And then... quietly and calmly... she put the blade to his neck and slit his throat.

---

The night had passed its midpoint not long ago, and was now beginning the slow climb toward dawn. The sky was still hours away from any signs of the sun when Lawson put the spyglass to his eye and looked out at the moonlit fields of corn and wheat. He was standing atop the mansion's roof... a roof that wasn't really made for standing... and the dark, distorted images of the spyglass only served to increase his growing sense of vertigo.

"Anything?" said Demmory, the older guard that he shared the roof with. Neither man was particularly happy about being up there, but orders were orders.

"Nuh-uh," Lawson replied. He lowered the glass and looked around with his natural vision... realizing for the forth or fifth time just how high up they were.

"Don't look down," said Demmory.

"Too late."

"You gonna fall?"

"You gonna catch me if I do?"

"Nope."

"Then I ain't fallin." Lawson sat down on the hideously uncomfortable roof and looked up at the moon. "All this trouble for one slave. A kid!"

"Ain't none ever got away before," said Demmory. "This is a big deal."

"Grady didn't seem too upset about it-"

"We work for Ellis, not Grady. And ELLIS was fit to explode when they came back without that boy. Heads is gonna roll over this one, I think. 'Specially if we let another one get away."

"We? Hell, I wasn't even on duty when the FIRST one ran off. And watchin fer slaves is an OVERSEERS job! OUR job is to make sure nobody in the mansion gets their throat slit in the middle of the night. Or the daytime, for that matter."

"Job is a job," Demmory shrugged. "Either we sit up here in the fresh air... or we wander the hallways until dawn. Pays the same either way."

"Hallways don't make me wanna puke when I look down."

"C'mon, Lawson... we ain't that high."

"Go ahead and hop on down there, then. Go ahead. I'll watch. Yeah.... I didn't think so."

"You're just mad that Ellis snagged you for roof duty before ya could sneak off to that party Percy was throwin."

"Don't know anything about no party."

"Riiiigh. I heard he had some slave girls locked up in that cabin of his. And I heard Casey broke into Jallan's liquor cabinet and carried off five gallons of his best hooch! Boy, somebody's gonna be raw in the mornin!"

"HA! Yeah, that Percy... I always liked him better than Mr. Ellis anyway. Don't know why the old man gives 'im such a hard time."

"'Cause he ain't a stuck-up bastard like all the rest of 'em, that's why. It's like a law around here... ya get yer hands on some money, you have to turn into a greedy bastard or none of the other greedy bastards want anything to do with ya."

"Ain't that the truth."

"Hey, isn't Reffric overdue?"

"Yeah..." Lawson put the glass to his eye and scanned the perimeter of the farm. Normally there were four overseers constantly circling the property... but Ellis had doubled that number after the escape. The last overseer that Lawson spotted was just now disappearing around the far side of the farm. The next one should have been in view by now... but he wasn't. Lawson squinted into the glass and frowned. "...probably snuck off to Percy's cabin. Lucky bastard."

"He was half drunk the last time he rode past, maybe he fell off his horse

"I dunno... tonight ain't the night to be desertin' yer post, that's for damn sure. Grady'll have his hide. No, wait, there he goes."

"Okay-"

"Hold on..."

Lawson examined the half-hidden shadow that he thought he saw. It was much too small to be a man on a horse. And moving too slowly. And it wasn't carrying a light. Lawson watched the shape move through the foliage until it finally stepped into the clear.

"...horn!" Lawson said suddenly.

"What?"

"HORN! Sound the horn! We got another one on the run!"

"Aww, HELL!"

Demmory put the dented bugle to his lips and fired off a long, shrill blast.

"LOOSE THE DOGS!" Lawson shouted to the guards and overseers as they came running from all directions. He pointed to the solitary figure he'd seen through the spyglass. "THERE! IN THE WOODS! ITS A GIRL! SHE'S ON THE RUN!"

"GO! GO! GO!" Came Grady's growling bark from somewhere below. A half-dozen men ran for the stables... and another half dozen sprinted across the fields on foot, their lamps jostling like giant, drunken fireflies as they ran to intercept the girl.

"SHE WENT INTO THE WOODS!" Lawson called after them. The girl must have heard the alarm and sought the cover of the trees. Without a lamp or light to give her away, it would be easy for her to disappear into the thousands of shadows..

But it wouldn't do her any good, for, mere seconds after Demmory had sounded the alarm, the night came alive with the snarls and howls of Harriek's dogs as they poured forth from the kennel...

---

Darkness.

For some reason, Bethsaida didn't expect it to be so dark in the woods. But it was. The trees formed a canopy overhead that blocked the moonlight quite effectively, plunging everything around her into deep inky blackness punctuated by sparse blotches of light. It was just enough light to keep moving... and that's exactly what she did.

Escape.

Escape was the only thing on her mind. Not Selie. Not Michael or her mother. Not Percy or the other men... or the horrible, horrible things they had done to her... and that she had done to them. Not even the pain of her bruises... or of the sharp leaves slicing her skin as she pushed her way past. None of that mattered. None of it existed.

Escape. Freedom.

It wasn't some vague concept that her mother never allowed them to speak of. It wasn't something she heard Ghan whispering about... or a word that the overseers spat at them like an epithet. It was real. It was real and it was close and she would either have it or die. It had been just a word before... but now it was something that she needed... SOON... if she was to live.

Yes. She needed it.

She needed it because the thing clutched in her hand was a weapon, and any slave caught with such an implement would be killed on sight. She needed it because the blood on that knife... and on her hands... and face... and in her hair... did not belong to her. Not ALL of it. She had tried to wash some of it off before she snuck away, but she didn't dare delay long enough to get it all. She was still filthy with it. With their blood. It dripped from her skin, and she left splashes of it along the path she made through the woods.

They would find her.

Bethsaida stopped walking just long enough to try and see the trail she was leaving. It was too dark to see footprints... but broken leaves and blood-splashed foliage were easy to spot. She knew that there were ways to move through the woods without leaving such signs... but she didn't know those ways. The overseers were going to find her. They were going to snatch her back to the farm and torture her and rape her... then hang her on the Tree. But not before they made her watch as they picked one person she loved slaughtered them before her eyes.

Only they were too late. Everyone she loved was dead.... including her own self. They had killed her. Grady had killed a large part of her that had been named 'Kenyari'. Hirk killed another part of her... the part named 'Selie.' He'd crushed her under his lust. Percy and the others had each slain tiny, unnamed pieces of her... one at a time... over and over again... for hour after agonizing hour. And then there was Michael. He had ripped out a bleeding chunk of her and took it with him when he ran. She was dead now. The overseers would be coming to find the only thing that she had left... her corpse

She would have to kill them.

It may be just a corpse... but it was HER corpse and it would see freedom before it finally decided to stop drawing breath.

Bethsaida heard the men shouting behind her. Far behind her... but not far enough. She walked faster... on bare, bloody feet. The voices spread out and fell back as the overseers searched. Occasionally they would stop talking and then Bethsaida would wait. She'd crouch down and wait until they weren't listening for her. When they started yelling orders and cursing, Bethsaida knew it was safe to move again. She could keep ahead of them that way...

...but then she heard the dogs.

Growling and snarling and barking... and a thousand other sounds that made Bethsaida's bare skin crawl. Dogs. They had released the beast Harriek and his animals... his inbred monsters. All teeth and muscle and hunger. And they were coming for her. Bethsaida couldn't tell how many, or how far... or even what direction. They seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Were they surrounding her? Did they already know where she was?

Were they going to devour her like they had done to Tenna?

The image flashed across Bethsaida's mind, and a bolt of fear rooted her to the spot for several terrifying seconds as she relived Ghan's hanging. Her throat went dry, and her heaving chest contracted so hard that she couldn't breathe.

They had fed her to the dogs.

One... inch... at a time.

But then, just as quickly as it had come, the fear subsided.... and Bethsaida ran. The dogs had her scent. And if they didn't they soon would. She had to move. She had to RUN. The devil's hounds were coming for her, and she had to RACE them to freedom.

She would win.

By all that was holy... by every soul in the Spirit King's embrace... she would win.

Her feet pounded the dirt as she ran. The very act of running was torture to her abused body, but the pain was nothing. It was nothing, just like the darkness was nothing. Sharp branches reached out from the shadows to slash her... then punch her and knock her down as she ran. Roots and sharp rocks snapped at her toes. They tripped her. But every time she fell, she fell silently. And she rose quickly. And she ran just as fast, if not faster, than she had been before.

But the hounds were closer now. Suddenly, their barking changed. Louder. Angrier. Hungrier. They'd found her trail. They were coming. She had to run faster. How far had she gone? Was she close to freedom now? Would she see it before...

No. She couldn't think of such things. She had to run. She couldn't think of the pain... or Michael... or Selie or mother or the pain or Michael or Percy or Grady or the pain or ANYTHING else but running fast, fast, as fast as she could.

Suddenly, her feet flew from under her as she fell. She rolled through the sharp roots, barely managing to keep a grasp of her... Percy's... dagger without impaling herself on the blade. She tumbled through a thorny bush... down a slight incline... and came to a rest in a small clearing. Moonlight beamed down from the sky, illuminating almost everything around her.

She saw none of it.

At first, her eyes were shut against the pain. And when she opened them...

The Tree.

The Hanging Tree loomed before her like a piece of hell itself that had burst up from the ground. Its gnarled branches stretched high and wide. The stench of rotting flesh clung to its dark, knotted trunk.

The Tree.

It was here... in the woods... where it should NOT be.

Bethsaida could feel the evil radiating off of it. But yet, she was not afraid. She knew.. somehow... that it was not here for her.

RRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

A fierce howl sounded in the woods. There was a pause, and then a chorus of guttural replies echoed forth. Most of the sounds came from canine throats, but the voices of men were woven into the song as well.

They were close. They had found her trail before... but now, they had found HER. They were no longer tracking splashes of blood or traces of scent... she HERSELF had been spotted or heard. They knew where she was. Bethsaida knew there was no way she could outrun them, but she refused to let the thought... or the images that came with it... take root. She had to flee. She had run. Maybe they WOULD catch her...

...but not here. Not in this place. The Tree. It was a bad omen; it cast evil shadows up on the ground, and upon her too, if she stayed. Perhaps she had something left to loose after all... something that was threatened by the dark thing that rose from the ground before her.

Bethsaida looked past the Tree and saw the path that was almost hidden behind it. The path that would have been obvious... even in the dark... if the Tree were not there. She quickly dashed through the thorny undergrowth and was gone.

Not ten seconds later, the shrubs surrounding the clearing came alive. They branches shook and their sharp leaves hissed at the passing of Harriek's beasts. The hounds leaping into the clearing more like galloping horses than dogs. The two lead dogs came as a pair, bounding out of the darkness and pausing in the center of the clearing. One dog's nose was pressed to the ground... snorting noisily at the blood and sweat that their quarry had left behind. The other hound eyed the Tree that dominated the clearing. After a moment's hesitation, the dog bared its teeth at the thing... and began to back away.

The other dogs came in twos and threes from several directions. Huge and monstrous they were... exploding into the moonlight like unchained demons unleashed from some distant hell. The prey was near. They had heard it... but now... there was something else.

The hounds growled deep in their muscled throats as their lips peeled away from their sharp, twisted teeth. Their nostrils flared, and their eyes narrowed at the sight of the Tree. Somehow... even with minds twisted by inbreeding and abuse...they sensed its darkness. They sensed its malice... its evil. The clearing was filled with it. Every snorted breath reeked of a malevolence that was greater than their own.

And they knew that it was watching them.

Eyes that could not themselves be seen glared down at them.

Their prey temporarily forgotten, the nervous hounds paced back and forth before the Tree. Some moved in to snap tentatively at its exposed roots, while others held back and growled warnings to one another.

Their snarls turned to whines as an ill wind began to blow through the clearing... a wind that disturbed the Tree's gnarled branches, but touched nothing else. Not even the hounds themselves. The moonlight cast sinister shadows through the Tree's foliage. Dark shapes danced across the ground as the wind grew.

The largest hound darted forward, clamped down on a root, and began to pull. Its teeth pierced the sour bark, releasing a powerful spurt of inky black sap right into the dog's mouth. The sap set the dog's tongue aflame with boiling pain. The dog yelped and leapt back... then barked furiously at the Tree. The other hounds took up the challenge, and their voices rang out even as the shadows danced sinister patterns across their backs.

ROOO!
ROORROOOROO!
ROOOOOOOOOOOOO!
RRROOO!
ARRROOOOOOO!

The Tree met their ignorant howls with the hiss of branches swaying faster in the air above them.

And in the distance, the voices of Harriek and the hunters rose in triumphant shouts. The hounds heard the voices of their masters, and some turned to bark warnings to them.

ROOOOORROO!

Stay Away.

ROOROOROOROOOOOO!

Evil Here.

ROOOOROOOROO-

...and then it all turned to yelps of surprise as the ground gave way beneath them.

It was as if the clearing had come alive. The ground became a churning, swirling pool of grass and dirt... all spiraling down into a black pit that had suddenly yawned open at its core. There was no time to fight... no time to struggle. Trapped in a flood of dirt and darkness, the dogs could only howl and whine as they were sucked down one by one. Only the three hounds closest to the edge of the disturbance managed to pull themselves free. They ran howling into the woods as the other twelve vanished into the giant, black MOUTH that had opened beneath them. And when the last hound had vanished into the pit, the mouth irised closed with the gentle sound of wind rushing through tall grass. The ground became as it had been... ominous and silent...

...except for the faint, muffled screams of the dogs filtering up through the dirt.


---

"...PERCY!" Chase shouted as he hammered on the door. Master Percy's cabin was quiet, with only a feeble light filtering through the curtains. There was no response to Chase's knock.

"PERCY," he shouted again. "WE GOT ANOTHER ESCAPE! PERCY! DAMMIT, PERCY!"

Chase grasped the latch and turned it... expecting to meet the resistance of a locked door. The latch turned freely. The door came open with the slightest of effort.

Chase didn't open it completely. He put his lips to the edge of the door and called:

"Hey! You awake in there! Didn't ya hear the horn?! We got another... Percy?"

Chase pushed the door open a little more and peered into the darkness. The one lamp in the room had almost gone out. There was just enough light to see the shadows of a few remaining partygoers passed out in various places in the room.

"See... I told you guys not to mess with that alchemist's liquor. Rough stuff, it is... Now Ellis is gonna have all yer hides for not answering the horn!" Chase thrust his own lamp into the room so he could see who he was talking to. "And when HE gets through with ya, GRADY is gonna-"

The words halted in Chase's mouth... catching painfully in his throat like a sharp briar.

"-ak" was all he managed to say. His stomach, already reeling from a night of partying... clenched and churned, sending a stream of bile and ale up to the top of Chase's throat... where he barely had the control to swallow it back down.

Chase stood motionless in the doorway... his eyes were the only part of him that moved, and he wished desperately that he could stop them.

It was a slaughterhouse.

The men passed out in the Percy's cabin weren't asleep... they were dead.

Very dead.

Reffrec... the overseer that was supposed to be patrolling the fields... sat upright in a chair, his chin resting calmly against his chest as huge pool of blood slowly congealed around him.

Cedrick, another overseer, was propped against wall near Percy's bedroom door... his head thrust back... mouth tightly closed. A SECOND set of lips... the new mouth that had been sliced across his throat... had already vomited up every drop of blood from his body, so now they just hung open obscenely, as if pursed for a kiss.

Hanaway lay in a similar state on Percy's sofa. There were a few other shapes curled up on the floor, but their faces were turned away, so Chase couldn't identify them. For that, he was thankful. All he could say for certain was that they were dead.

The stench of blood was like a fist slapping Chase repeatedly across the face with every breath. Chase didn't want to go in. In fact, for the first few seconds, he COULDN'T, as it was physically impossible for him to move. But he slowly recovered enough to put one foot in front of the other... all while fighting the spasms of his stomach, which was continuously trying to empty itself onto the floor. With every step, his lamp revealed more and more about the carnage that had occurred. Small, feminine footprints trailed through the lake of blood on the floor. Bloody hand prints marred the walls... as did long red splashes of blood: the first gushes of a newly slit throat.

"...good gods in heaven..." Chase gasped as he made his way further into the room, delving deeper into the bloody horror.

That's when he saw Hirk.

Hirk was a large, brutal man. There was no way that any of this would have happened if he had been awake. But he hadn't been. He'd passed out on Percy's table, and crushed it. And then...

...and then someone had come and...

Chase tried to shove his fist into his own mouth just to stop the scream. It worked. Just barely.

Everyone else had been done with a simple slice to the throat, but Hirk had been butchered where he lay. Dozens of knife-marks dotted his wide back, as if the gods had rained daggers upon him while he slept. His head was still attached to his neck, but only because whoever had done this lacked the strength, knowledge, and the proper tools to accomplish what they'd started.

"...oh, Hirk..." Chase reached down to close his friend's dead eyes... only to discover that he had no eyes. AND that there was another corpse beneath him. The girl. Not the older one that he had had his fun with earlier... the younger one. She was dead, but not savaged like Hirk had been. No, she'd been crushed. From the looks of it, it had probably happened when Hirk was...

Chase didn't finish the thought. Not because it was profoundly perverse... but because finishing it would bring the faint, but inevitable inkling that Hirk was somehow responsible for what had happened to him. And THAT would imply that Chase was deserving of something similar for HIS part in the night's festivities.

His mind didn't feel like traveling down that particularly disturbing path at the moment. He kept himself focused on what he saw, and the conclusions that he could draw from it. It was very simple. Whoever had done this lacked the strength to move Hirk, so they'd slit his throat and then tried to cut him to pieces the way one would section a hog or a chicken for easy transport. It didn't prove as easy as it looked, so they'd given up and...

...and?

Chase saw the footprints. They lead from Hirk's body to the door. Not the front door.

To Percy's door.

Again, Chase froze.

He should go get help.

He should go get Ellis and Grady and the guards. He should get them NOW! NOW!! RIGHT NOW!

Yes. He would go now. He wouldn't open the door; he'd just turn around and leave and go get the others. Then he'd help track down the little slave bitch that had done this. Yes, that's exactly what he would do.

After he opened the door.

Chase crossed the room and grasped the latch. He turned it. It was unlocked.

He pushed the door open... just a hair.

He paused for what seemed like a year, then opened it a little more. He raised his lamp.

He saw the corner of the bed.... a sheet soaked in blood and covered in... strange lumpy things.... things that looked like....

Chase tore his eyes away. He lowered them to the floor, where he'd wouldn't have to see...

...the thing. Not on the bed... the OTHER thing. On the floor. Just inside the door, as if it'd been causally tossed aside during the....

Chase went cold. Very, very cold. Blood drained from his face as he slowly pulled the door closed again, being careful not to catch it on the discarded lump of flesh as he did. He wondered... at what point had it been done? Had Percy been alive? Awake? Did he see it when she tossed it across the room? Did his eyes follow it when it hit the wall with a splatter and slid slooowllly dooowwwn...

Chase ran the thoughts out of his mind. He quietly turned away from the door and the horror behind it.... his only thought was to go very far away, and to do so very quickly.

And yet he still managed to throw up several times between Percy's bedroom and the front door.


---

"KEEP UP WITH ME, ya damned LAZY ASSES!" Harriek swore at the three men behind him. Two overseers and a guard were helping him track the slave, but so far, they'd been barely able to keep up. Not that keeping up with Harriek was some simple chore. The man was almost as fast as the dogs he raised.... and every bit as ugly. "SOUNDS LIKE THEY GOT HER UP A TREE!"

"Well she'll still be up there when we get there!" Dervith called back.

"C'MON!" Harriek drew his short sword and, holding his lamp high and slightly in front of him, began hacking through the undergrowth. He could hear the dogs barking not far away. It sounded promising. The girl had gotten farther than he would have guessed... which meant he'd probably just lost his bet with Dervith and Fyse. "THIS WAY!" he shouted.

Harriek sliced through more foliage, only to find a nest of thick vines blocking his path. He began hacking at them as well, hoping to clear enough to squeeze through-

"-eh?" he said suddenly. The dogs.

They'd stopped barking. There was a flurry of canine yelps and squeals up ahead... and then nothing.

"What was that?" said Dervith as he arrived at Harriek's side. Fyse and Thristan emerged bushes a second later. Thristan stepped through boldly with his sword drawn. Fyse tripped over a root and nearly fell on his own lamp. The four men stood silently... listening...

"What happened?" said Fyse. "How come I don't hear-"

"Shhhh..." Harriek motioned for them to be quiet. He listened for a few moments longer, and then: "Somethin's wrong."

"Yeah, we're standing here listening to the trees grow while another slave is escaping," said Thristan. "Which way, Harriek?"

"They was this way..." Harriek squeezed through the vines, then he and Dervith cut a trail through the woods, heading toward where they'd last heard the dogs.

"She came this way," Thristan announced. He pulled a low-hanging leaf from a tree and handed it to Harriek. The leaf bore a splash of blood. Harriek nodded, pretending to care. Thristan was an idiot... stupid, even for a guard. They'd passed dozens of such signs, and this was the first one he'd noticed.

"Why'd the dogs stop barking?" said Dervith. "What's that mean Harriek?"

"It means something happened," Harriek whispered.

"Something like what?"

"I don't know. I don't like the way this sounds..."

"You think she killed 'em?" said Fyse.

"Fifteen dogs? Fifteen of MY dogs?"

"Why don't you call 'em?" Dervith suggested.

Harriek thought for a moment... then shook his head. He kept walking silently, moving ahead of the others and crouching low to the ground. Every few steps, he stopped to listen. Occasionally he heard sounds... distant and faint... so faint that he couldn't identify them.

"I don't like this," he reminded his companions.

"Me neither," Dervith whispered. "Those dogs-"

"Harriek," Thristan warned. "If those mutts of yours turn on us, I swear-"

"I trained those dogs to hunt and kill," said Harriek. "If they happen to take a likin' to the taste of ya... there ain't much you're gonna be able to do about it 'cept scream and die... so keep your empty threats to yourself."

"I don't like-" Thristan began. He didn't finish.

They came up the clearing unexpectedly... as if the clearing had just now decided to reveal itself to them. One moment, the four men were slicing their way through vines and branches,... and in the next, they were stepping down a short incline into a small open area. An area dominated by a monstrous tree and blanketed by an eerie silence... as if some sound that SHOULD have been there had just stifled itself upon their arrival.

"Where the hell are we?" said Dervith.

Harriek took a few steps into the clearing and paused... allowing the others to pass him. They approached the giant tree in stunned wonder, while Harriek held back and listened. This was the place where the dogs had been. He could almost smell them... but where were they? What happened to them?

"This can't be natural," said Fyse. "This tree.... its the damned spitting image of the one back at the farm. Can't be..."

Thristan held his lamp up, and searched the tree's dark branches for any sign of the girl. Finding none, he examined the surrounding trees.

"eh?" said Dervith.

"What?"

"Fyse, was that you?"

"Was that me what?"

"You just say something?"

"I said this tree ain't natural-"

"No, after that."

Fyse shrugged.

"Yer hearin' things," he said.

"No, I heard it too," said Harriek, finally stepping forward to join the others before the massive tree. He HAD heard it... a soft, tingling sound. A tiny whisper... so faint that it hardly existed at all.

"There it is again," said Dervith. "Thristan?"

"I don't hear anything."

"Well, LISTEN, damn ye! I'm tellin' you I HEAR something!"

"SHhhhhh!" Harriek put his finger to his lips and looked around suspiciously. The sound came again... a faint noise just beside his left ear. Was it even a word? He couldn't tell. He turned and swung his lamp... but saw only shadows. But even as the shadows fled the lamp's light, another whisper touched his right ear. "Hey!" he growled, shrugging his shoulder past his ear as if shooing a fly.

"I heard that," said Fyse. "Something just flew past me."

"What?" said Thristan.

"I dunno... something cold. Sounded almost like a-"

"A voice," Dervith finished.

"What'd it say?" said Fyse.

"I don't-"

"....f..."

"I heard it!"

"...n...f..."

"There it is... over here!" Fyse drew his blade and slashed at nothing.

"...nn...f..."

"I heard it that time," Thristan growled. "Harriek, it was over there by you-"

"No it wasn't, it was over by-"

"e...f..."

"GOTCHA!" Dervith carved a few chunks out of the air beside him in a surprisingly deft move that served no purpose whatsoever. "...eh? There's nothing here-"

"...e...n...f..."

"That's because its over here," Thristan said slowly. He began to crouch down, peering from side to side slowly, as if the source of the sounds was only visible through the corners of his eyes. His weapon was already drawn. He held it ready-

"...f..."

SLASH!

"I almost had it!" Thristan called.

"No, its over here!" said Fyse.

"No, HERE!" Dervith countered.

They were all right. The sound was everywhere... all around them, like a swarm of bees all humming snippets of the same note, over and over and over again...

"e..."

"...n..."

"....f...."

The sounds got louder... stronger... and a wind began to rustle the leaves of the great tree as Dervith, Fyse, and Thristan danced almost comically in the clearing, trying to carve out pieces of the invisible whispers.

Harriek slowly backed away from them. He heard the sounds too... probably more so than the others. But fighting them... or even finding out what they were... did not seem like a particularly smart idea. He slowly put one foot behind the other... moving back toward the trees as the hushed whispers in the clearing began to fit together like pieces of a puzzle...

"...nf..."

"...en...nf..."

"...enough..."

They all heard the word at the same time. And then they all heard it again-

"...enough!..."

".......enough!..."

"............enough!..."

The single word was whispered... and then shouted out of the air itself. Shouted in a dozen... a hundred... a thousand different voices:

"...Enough!..."

"...Enough!..."

Harriek had already turned to run when the sonic assault rose to a single deafening roar-

"ENOUGH!"

-followed by a muffled BOOM! as the ground beneath them surged upward. The sudden jolt tossed them all into the air. And when they came down, swords and lamps flew from their grasps... abandoned by terrified hands that were scrambling to find purchase in the suddenly roiling earth.

"YAaaaaaa!" Fyse screamed.

The ground had risen up to form a low dome... and then, just as suddenly, it sank back down to the way it had been before: Flat and quiet. Harriek, Fyse, Dervith, and Thristan all lay face down on the motionless ground... hugging it for dear life.

"...what was that..." Fyse whispered.

"...I dunno..." Dervith whispered back.

"Well," said Fyse. "Wh-what do we do now?"

"We get the hell outta here, that's what." said Dervith.

"You move first. I'll follow ya."

"No, YOU move first..."

"...ohhhh, myyy gods..." Harriek exhaled in a low hushed whisper. Like everyone else, he was still laying flat. But his ear was pressed to the ground, where it could hear the thing that the others could not. Where it could detect the faint scratchings... and the muffled canine whines coming from below them...

... from under the ground.

"Oh, my gods..." Harriek hissed. The glistening in his eyes almost looked like tears. Whether they were of pain or terror or sadness, it was impossible to tell. "My babies..."

"Harriek, what the hell's wrong with you?" said Thristan.

Harriek rose to his knees and began scratching at the dirt, pulling up fist-fulls of dry grass and clumps of twisted roots as he dug.

"They're under here!" he said hurriedly, as if he couldn't spare the time or the energy to speak. He kept digging. They were down there... beneath the ground. The dogs. He had to get them out. "C'mon, help me dig!"

"Dig WHAT?" said Dervith, risking an annoyed tone despite the fact that he had yet to move a single muscle.

"My babies! The hounds... they're still ALIVE down there!"

-thump-

Harriek's hands left the ground briefly as he leaned back in surprise. The sound was almost like an impact, but not of something falling from the sky into their midst. No, this was something just beginning to push its way up from below-

-thump-
-thump-

-thump-

The men all rose.... not quite standing, but not quite convinced that they should lay where they were, either. They looked around at the source of the thumping sounds... at the tiny mounds of dirt pushing up from the ground-

-thump-

"Harriek..." Dervith said nervously. "What did you do...?"

"They're still alive! They're still alive!" Harriek's kept digging.

-thump-

The mounds of dirt began to grow... springing like foul mushrooms from the earth. There were twelve of them... all quickly taking on the appearance of freshly filled graves. But they were not as quiet as the tombs they resembled. They filled the air with faint and terrible sounds... the rumble and hiss of the dirt as it fell away... he undeniable thumping and scratching of things moving beneath the ground... things that were clawing their way up to the surface with sinister determination...

"Harriek!" Thristan shouted for no reason. He eyed the grave-mound that rose before his eyes. He reached for his sword, only to be reminded that he'd dropped it and it was now lost somewhere in the darkness. "Harriek what is this!"

And then the thumping and digging noises were joined by a high-pitched whining... the whine of tortured animals. It got louder as, one by one, the mounds split open, giving terrible birth to the nightmare that had come from below.

The shape hauled itself up from the dark pit. Its sleek muscles bulged as its forward section burst free, as if propelled by nothing more than sheer force of will. But the job was only half done. Huge paws found purchase in the dirt, and the hound dragged its lower body free like some spawnling clawing free of the womb under its own unholy strength.

"Hale..." Harriek called. Even in the darkness, he recognized his prized hunting dog from the tightness of its body and the overly triangular shape of its head. And indeed, it WAS Hale, for the monstrous dog turned its head toward Harriek when it heard its master's voice.

The hound shook itself in the manner that all dogs do.... but the clods of filth that flew from its coat weren't dirt, but rather clumps of fur and bits of rotted, putrefying flesh ... for the thing that had been vomited up from the earth was not the same as that which had been swallowed. Even though the hound has been interred for only a few minutes, it was as if it had buried for months... submerged in the deepest swamps surrounding hell itself.

Hale's lips peeled back... the upper lip fell away entirely... and its twisted, yet perfectly white fangs glistened hungrily in the moonlight. The hounds eyes began to glow. They did not glimmer or gleam... this was no mere reflection of the moon's light...

The eyes glowed...

...lit from within by their own infernal luminescence.

And as the other hounds emerged, Hale's huge throat vibrated with a growl so deep and menacing that it dislodged even more flesh from its rotting body.

"I'm outta here!" Dervith turned and ran, but two canine shapes burst from the earth and immediately intercepted him. One hound sank its teeth into Dervith's calf and tore the large muscle right off the bone. Dervith squealed like a pig as he fell. The other hound bit into his shoulder and, with a crunch that was audible even over the overseer's scream, removed the entire arm in one chomp.

Dervith kept screaming, but they were the insane howls of a dead man who had not yet accepted the fact that he was dead. No one heard him... and no one saw the two hounds greedily tearing his still-struggling body to bloody pieces.

Everyone else had problems of their own.

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"

Fyse's sword had landed nearby... and at Dervith's first scream of agony, he took up the weapon and-

CHOMP!

-lost it once again as a leaping hound bit off his lower arm, shattering the bone in its powerful jaws.

"AAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIEEEE!!!" Fyse staggered backward, holding his bloody stump before him as if it had the power to keep the demonic hounds from taking the rest of him.

It didn't.

Six of the hounds surrounded him and began to feed. Thristan drew his hunting knife and leapt atop one of the beasts in an effort to save his friend. The sharp blade pierced the dog's rotting flesh, and he carved a line down its flank. The dog didn't flinch. Thristan put the blade to the dog's throat, but by then another of the hounds had grabbed his foot-

KKRRACKLE!

Thristan felt every one of the tiny bones in his foot splinter.

"AAARRRRGH!"

The attacking hound pulled... its teeth peeled off strips of flesh and leather... removing Thristan's boot AND his foot. Thristan slid from the first hound's back and slashed at second. The blade struck home, but did nothing to keep the rotting thing from taking another chunk of his leg. The guard kicked with his free leg. His boot sank into the dog's spongy flesh with the sickening sound of half-rotted bones snapping under a blanket of pus and fur. An instant later, a third hound's jaws closed around his leg and bit down... shattering his kneecap.

"HAARRRIIIIEEEEEEKKKK!!!!" Thristan screamed. "HARRIEK HELLLAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGHHH!"

The last thing Thristan saw before he died was the bloody smear where Fyse had fallen. The pack of hounds parted briefly, allowing him a view of what had once been a man... but was now only a pile of shredded rags soaking in a small lake of blood. There was no body. The hounds had eaten it all.

And then a darkness that reeked of rotting flesh and closed around Thristan's face. He heard something crack... and then realized that it was his skull...

Harriek was frozen.

A ring of dogs had surrounded him, snarling at him as he watched the others die. They made no move to attack... and he made no move to run. He had trained them... raised them from puppies. He knew them. He knew that running would only excite them. Fighting would anger them. His only hope was to stand still and pray. He hadn't prayed to anyone... for anything... since he was a child. But he prayed now.

"...oh please..." he begged some unknown memory of the gods his parents worshiped. "...please..."

The snapping of Thristan's bones chocked off the prayer. The crunching and slurping of human bones filled the clearing. Harriek swooned as the circle of hounds inched closer, flesh and pus dripping from them with every step. Hale was among them... eyes glowing... fangs bared.

"...H-Hale." Harriek said tentatively. "C-come on, boy... s-s-sit. Down... b-b-back away.... oh, gods..."

Hale growled. The sound temporarily drowned out the other horrible sounds from the clearing... but it was no reprieve. Harriek would rather hear the sound of his OWN flesh tearing that listen to that growl. That growl told him that there was nothing of Hale left in the rotting form. Something had devoured it. Swallowed it and digested it the same way that these dogs had feasted on Fyse, Dervith, and Thristan. But then it had spat out these half-rotted things for some purpose that Harriek dare not... DARE not... imagine. Fyse was gone. Dervith wasn't even a pile of clothes any more... the dog's hunger was so profound that they even swallowed the strips of cloth and lapped up the splashes of blood.

And Thristan...

...three hounds hid him from view, but Harriek heard the slurping sounds and caught glimpses of the shattered half-skull, already stripped of flesh.

One by one, the other hounds finished their meals and trotted over to join the circle around Harriek. Soon, all twelve of them surrounded him... standing in judgment around him like a demonic jury. They licked their lips... those of them that still HAD lips... and growled as the circle slowly closed in.

..slowly...

......slowly...

Harriek saw the discarded oil lamp not far away... still burning in the grass. It had landed upright; its base was still filled with oil.

Harriek didn't think. Thinking would have telegraphed his intentions... the hounds would have seen his glance.... smelled the change in his scent...

Instead, he merely acted.

He exploded into a prize-winning leap that carried him over the ring of hounds. He felt something leap after him-

CHOMP!

-and narrowly avoid ripping his stomach open in mid-air. He landed on his considerable gut... fingers resting against the hot globe of the lamp. Harriek grabbed the lamp's handle and swung it as he sat up-

KSSHHHHHH!!
FWOOOOOOOOOMM!!

The lamp struck the side of the first dog's head. The globe shattered, sending hot oil splashing over several of the animals... as well as Harriek's arm. The burning wick ignited the oil, unleashing a searing conflagration.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGH!" Harriek's arm was engulfed from the elbow to the fingertips. Three of the dogs became pillars of flame... their flesh sizzling as it burned. But their flaming mouths continued to snarl...

RAAAAGH!

They attacked.

Harriek didn't feel the first of his blackened fingers disappearing down the dog's throat. The second bite took flesh that still had nerves remaining, but the pain of the fire overwhelmed it. But when a huge, flaming beast came thundering into his chest, knocking him over, he knew that he was doomed. Harriek fought anyway. He swung his burning arm... which now lacked a hand... and tried to dislodge the beast before it could bite off his face. Images of Thristan's faceless skull gave him strength, and he managed to roll over onto his back, where at least he could keep his gut and throat protected. He rolled into a ball, but one of he hounds had his leg in its jaws-

"AAAAAAHHAAAHAAAAARRRGH!" Harriek bellowed as the beast sank its teeth into his thigh. He felt the tendons and ligaments snapping as the dog pulled at the large, succulent muscle... "AAAAAAAHHH!!!"

Harriek reached out for something... anything...

...the trees... if he could just reach the trees, he could climb to safety. He'd be maimed for life, but he would BE alive. Dragging one leg behind him, Harriek tried to crawl, but the dogs pulled him in different directions... rolling him back and forth, snapping at his extremities.... removing larger and larger pieces of flesh with each snarling chomp.

"HELLLLPPP!" Harriek screamed. "HELLLLP!"

His eyes fell upon the giant Tree that had greeted them when they'd first arrived at the clearing. He reached out for it, as if it had the power to save him.

"HELLLLLLPPPP! Help me! Help MEEEE!!"

The Tree moved.

Its twisted bark gathered into cancerous knots.... forming a face that scowled down at Harriek with eyes of black emptiness. The branches swayed back and forth, throwing their shadows down upon Harriek's upturned face as they danced. The sound of them caused the hound to pause in their feasting on Harriek's flesh. They looked up at the tree and began to whine, as if terrified at the approach of an angry master. Terrified... yet too hungry to completely abandon their meal, the formed a rotting circle around Harriek as roots slithered through the solid earth like snakes in a stream... pulling themselves up and withdrawing into the trunk as the branches began to shorten and thicken. The face shrank and solidified... becoming human as the branches merged. When the roots had retracted into the trunk, the trunk split up the middle for a short distance, creating two legs that supported a petrified human form... a dark shape that stood with arms/branches stretching upward toward the sky. With a final surge of motion that was not motion... the Tree made the final leap from one demonic form to another. The looming, monstrous oak was no more... in it's place stood a tall, slender man. A dark and evil man. A man with the skin and hair of a slave, but it was no slave that Harriek had ever seen... even in a nightmare. His limbs were long and thin, his torso so shrunken that it was almost malnourished... nearly skeletal. He wore a tattered loincloth, and his eyes blazed with a fire no slave would ever dare turn upon a white man. The fire of wrath... ancient, boundless, and unholy beyond words.

The mere sight of him brought prayers to Harriek's lips once more. He wept and choked his way through every prayer he had ever known. And when the pitifully short litany was complete, he punctuated it with undirected pleas and sobs for mercy.

"...oh gods... oh, gods please..."

"Your gods do not hear you," said the slave that was not a slave. His voice was surprisingly human, yet filled with power that made Harriek's ravaged body tremble from the mere sound of it. The man's words were poorly formed, garbled by rage and an accent that Harriek could not place. The man approached the trembling slave-tracker. The circle of snarling, half-digested dogs parted to let him pass. "Your evil drove dem away long ago... now dere is not'ing to protect you from dat which you haf earned..."

"...please... please don't hurt me... please, whoever you are... I don't have much, but... oh gods PLEASE don't kill me!..."

"HAHAHAHAAA!" The slave's laugh echoed in Harriek's skull like a thunderclap that only HE could hear. It was a hard laugh. "You cannot buy or beg mercy from doze dat you haf wronged! Dere unquiet SOULS cry out for vengeance, and I haf come to make it so! I am de hand of de Sprit King... servant and master of power beyond dat which you can conceive! I am de child of de spirits! I am N'DOKI! And I bring WRATH!!"

At the slave's final word, the hounds converged on Harriek. Even as their slavering, rotted jaws tore at him, Harriek felt one of them leap onto his back and bury its teeth into his back. It was Hale... largest and most vicious of them all. The hound ripped out painful nibbles of muscle until its teeth found the prize it sought. They clamped like hooks into Harriek's backbone, and with one powerful motion... even as Harriek's eyes begged for mercy... the hound tore the spine right out of its master's body.

---

Bethsaida didn't know which way she was going. The path could have been heading back to the farm for all she knew... but the dogs were still back there, so she had to keep running. The pain was almost too much for her to ignore now. Her legs nearly buckled with every step. She was bleeding more. Once, when the dogs seemed to grow quiet, she had gathered some moss and some fungus... she'd mixed them with her own spittle to form a paste that she spread on as many the wounds as she could reach. She made bandages from vines and leaves, and was applying when the sounds of pursuit came again.

There didn't seem to be as many dogs now... but they were close. They howled and yipped as if the devil himself was after them, and they were headed right for her.

Bethsaida abandoned her last few bandages and ran.

The trees continued to slap at her as she tore through their branches and leaves. More wounds... more blood. She wasn't tired... but the PAIN. She thought about praying, but she couldn't spare the willpower. It was the only thing keeping her moving. Willpower. Not fear... not fear of pain or even fear for her life. She was already dead... willpower was all she had left.

The woods grew denser, and soon the 'path' she was on vanished altogether, leaving her with no direction and no hope. Not that hope mattered to the dead. She sliced at the vines with the knife she'd taken from Percy. Thick sap mixed with the half-dried blood, and the gooey substance ran over her tattered fingers.

ROOOO!!!!

They were coming. No way she could outrun them.

ROOOROOOO!

There didn't sound like many, but they were CLOSE!

The snarling and barking gave way to the rustling of grass as the hounds came for her. Bethsaida's illusions of freedom dissolved like sugar in a downpour.

She was caught.

Bethsaida glanced down at the knife she held...

Tenna.

Ghan.

Kenyari.

Selie.

...the knife. She was caught, yes... but she swore to herself that the first thing to touch her, be it man or beast, was going to die.

Yes. Her run slowed to a walk... and then her feet stopped moving altogether.

No more running.

Michael was the coward. HE had run. SHE would do what he could not. She would fight and die, and then the other slaves would gather at night and speak in terrified whispers about how SHE... a HOUSE slave... a GIRL child... had taken some of the master's beasts down with Master Percy's OWN knife.

Her death would be a legend, and in those whispered words she would live forever, like the Spirit King and his servants. That was why she had seen the Tree in the clearing. The Spirit King wished her to join him-

ROOO-ROOOOROOOOO!

-and so it would be.

Bethsaida looked around for something she could use. She had a knife, yes, but she was no fool. Maybe if she had a stick, she could bash one of the hounds with it while tearing out another's throat. That way she could kill TWO of them, and her legend would be that much greater.

There was a tree nearby, with a short, low branch. Above it, there were many smaller branches... too small to climb, or swing as a blunt weapon, but if they could be cut loose and sharpened with her knife... Yes. Yes... that was even better.

Bethsaida put the handle of Percy's knife between her teeth and held it tight as she climbed. The grass and vines were hissing like a hard rain... and the hounds burst into view just as Bethsaida snatched her legs up out of their reach.

Three dogs... big and vicious... surrounded the tree and tried to leap up after her. They howled... mouths upturned in long, warbling ululations. They had her cornered... or so they thought.

Bethsaida reached for the upper branches, but then-

CRACK!

The thick branch she was standing on snapped... remaining attached to the trunk only by a thin strip of bark. The branch was rotten. It was going to-

SNAP!

Before the girl could even examine the situation, the branch was gone. She fell with it... right into the midst of the animals. The distance wasn't far, but the dogs were on her the instant she landed.

One animal leapt-

GGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

"YAAAAAAAARRR!!!!!"

Instead of ducking and covering her face, Bethsaida threw herself at the animal, driving her knife straight into its throat. The hound made a gurgling sound, then fell to the side... with the knife still buried in its neck. Its dead weight twisted the knife out of Bethsaida's hand just as the second hound bit down on her leg. She felt its teeth scraping against her bone as it tried to pull her.

Bethsaida plunged her fingers DEEP into the hound's gleaming eyes.

"-IIIIPPEE!" The dog released her bleeding calf. Bethsaida's other hand fell upon a piece of rotted branch. She snatched it up and swung it... not at the second dog, but at the third.

CRACK!

She broke the branch over its head even as it tried to snatch her other leg. The dog was stunned for an instant, but then it leapt. Bethsaida raised the broken stump of branch and thrust it into the dog's mouth... not lengthwise, but straight on... jamming the jagged, slightly pointed end straight down its throat.

The dog tried to yelp, but all it could manage was a coughing sound as its teeth gnawed at the rotted bark. Bethsaida jammed the piece of branch even deeper, putting all her weight and strength behind it. It slid in an inch... stopped... and then plunged in almost a foot, tearing its way into the hound's chest.

"YYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Bethsaida roared.

Something hit her from behind. The second hound, the one she had blinded. Its jaws took her leg just above the knee. Blood oozed from its empty eye sockets as the animal bit deep.

"AAAAAAAAAAAGGH!"

Bethsaida hit the dog with her fist. Her pitiful hand bounced off of its hard skull. The dog growled... its teeth sawed back and forth in her flesh.

"NYAAAAARGH!"

Ignoring... or perhaps BECAUSE of the pain... Bethsaida leaned forward and used the only real weapon she had.

She bit the dog's neck, just behind the clenching, rock-hard jaw. She bit HARD. There was no hope of her matching the grip that the beast's jaws had on her leg, but the dog's flesh was still flesh... and her teeth sank into it with an angry, desperate rage. She clenched her teeth as hard as she could... and then HARDER as the first taste of red warmth gushed across her tongue. She ripped out a plug of fur, then bit down in the exact same spot, gnawing and tearing deeper into its throat.

Sensing the attack, the hound released her leg and went for HER throat. But the hound was small and blind... and Bethsaida had tasted its mortality. She shoved the animal backward and immediately leapt on top of it. Her head went down... she tore at the beast's neck with fingers and teeth... ripping out another gleeful mouthful of bloody fur. The dog yelped and squirmed free. Bethsaida grabbed its leg with both hands. The hound turned and clamped down on her wrist. Bethsaida pulled with all her anger, and felt the dog's leg break in her hands. The dog screamed, and in doing so, released Bethsaida's arm. The girl struggled to her feet and saw the dog standing awkwardly before her... growling ferociously at the thing it could smell and hear, but not see. Bethsaida saw its black lips quivering around its white teeth...

...and the sight only made her angrier.

"NNNYAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!" She roared.

The dog lowered its head and limped away from the roaring, bellowing monster. Bethsaida watched the pitiful thing hobble away, running for its life... the way that SHE had been running only a few moments before. She reclaimed her knife form the corpse of the first hound and examined the bodies. The second hound was still alive... somewhat. It was twitching in the grass, its life's blood gushing out through its mouth.

Bethsaida left it to suffer.

Freedom still awaited her, and mercy for her enemies was no reason to delay her journey.

---

"What was that!?"

The distant scream snapped Lawson and Demmory out of their daydreams and brought them back to the cold, high roof on which they still perched. At first, neither of them was sure that they had heard anything... but then it came again.

A different scream from a different direction. And definitely closer.

"Somewhere in the woods," said Demmory. Lawson put the spy glass to his eye and looked across the fields.

"...aiiieeeeeee...!"

"What the hell?" said Demmory. He crouched beside Lawson... then pointed. "There!"

Lawson didn't need the spyglass to see it. The thick white fog was as visible against the black night as it was unnatural for this time of year. But there it was... a low, incredibly thick mist rolling out of the woods before them. The fog was so white that it almost glowed... and so impenetrable that, once it began to emerge, neither of the watchmen could see the line of trees from which it had just come. It obscured them completely, like the darkness itself. It did not appear to be localized, but rather, it stretched from one end of the farm to the other like a giant crescent closing in around the property... rolling toward the mansion...

And out of that fog came a scream:

"AAA! AAA! OH, GODS NOOOO-AAAIIIIIIIEEEEE!"

"WHO IS THAT!" Demmory shouted. "DOES SOMEBODY NEED HEL-"

"AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHH-"

The last scream was closer... not in the woods at all, but in the fields, where the fog was just beginning to roll across Ellis's prize crops. There were overseers and guards everywhere... patrolling the farm on horseback as well as on foot. Some where in those same fields that were rapidly disappearing under the fog's sinister advance-

"IT HURRRRTSSS!"

"HELP ME! HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"

"...sound the alarm...." said Lawson.

"Is... is it an escape?"

"I don't CARE what it is, BLOW the damned HORN!" Lawson screamed.

Demmory put the horn to his lips and sounded a loud, warbling note.... then sounded it again.

"ATTAAAACK!" Lawson added. "WE'RE UNDER ATTTAAAAAACK!"

Guards and overseers, drawn by both the horn and the screams that preceded it, began pouring into the courtyard from several directions. A large group of overseers, thinking that Demmory had sounded the escape alarm again... were sprinting across the fields toward the slave quarters.

The fog saw them.

A huge white tendril stretched out across the land and cut across their path like a scythe. A few men paused, but most of them kept running as the fog came straight at them.

"NO!" Lawson shouted. "GO BACK! GO BACK! NOOO!"

The unnatural fog swallowed them whole. There was a second of eerie silence, and then the screams burst out from the hidden cornfields: High-pitched shrieks of terror and agony that sent blazing chills down Lawson's spine. One by one, the screams stopped... plunging the farm once more into unsettling silence.

The overseers in the field... the one's who'd stopped running... started running again. Back toward the mansion. They turned and ran from the fog as fast as they could, but then, horror of horror... the fog came after them. It rose up like a huge mountain of white... a giant wave... that surged after them with all the force of a hurricane. It disturbed not a single leaf of a single plant, but the overseers in front of it felt its presence behind them... they felt the sinister force gaining on them... coming faster and faster and FASTER...

"Oh, my GODS!" said Lawson. Of all the men on the farm, only he and Demmory could see the full horror of what was coming. From their vantage point, under the light of the unusually bright full moon, they could fog take on terrible shapes as it chased the overseers back toward the mansion. They could see the slivers of darkness twisting and dancing within the fog itself... leaping back and forth like hounds at play.

"INSIDE! GET INSIDE!" Demmory shouted down at the men in the courtyard. Half of them had already gone inside. Most of the remainder drew their weapons and charged out toward the approaching doom.

"YOU FOOLS!" Lawson cried. He put the spyglass to his eye and looked out at the fleeing overseers as the leading edge of the fog swallowed them. He saw...

Lawson's face went white. Not pink, or pale... it was white. He dropped the glass, and the expensive lens shattered when it hit the rooftop.

"What's happening!" Demmory demanded nervously.

"...we have to go..." Lawson said after a pause. His voice began as a whisper, but it quickly rose to a frantic shout as he continued. "We have to go! We have to GO! WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!!"

He lunged for the rope ladder that lead from the roof to the ground. Demmory grabbed him.

"We can't desert our post!" Demmory shouted.

Lawson drew back and punched Demmory in the face.

At that instant, as Demmory swooned on the rooftop, new screams erupted from the fields as the fog gleefully snatched up all those who dared approach it. It was moving faster now, drawn by the sight and scent of prey. If there was some doubt as to whether it was a natural phenomenon before, that doubt was now an undeniable certainty as it surged toward the mansion like a living, breathing thing.... like a hungry spider hurtling toward a freshly trapped fly.

A crowd of guards and overseers fled before it like gnats. None of them were running towards it now... all of THOSE fools were either dead, or had suddenly found enlightenment in the dying screams of those who'd reached the fog ahead of them. The men poured back into the courtyard, where Master Ellis had just emerged from the house.

"WHAT THE HELL-"

"BACK INSIDE! BACK INSIDE! BACK INSIDE!" the guards screamed at him. Several of the guards grabbed him, but the old man was strong... he wrestled free and stormed across the courtyard just as the huge crescent of fog stretched its arms around the mansion and swallowed it whole.

"YAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" Lawson screamed as Demmory held him by the waist. "LEMME GO!"

"It's TOO LATE!" Demmory screamed in his ear. "It's already ON us!"

Lawson looked around. Everything... in every direction...was white. Only the sky above was unblotted by the infernal anti-darkness.

The two men squatted motionless on the roof. Below them, the courtyard fell silent.

"Now tell me where would you rather be," Demmory whispered. "Safe up here... or down there with them?"

"...but... but IS it safe up here?" Lawson hissed as the fog rose up around them... and then slowly billowed forward, engulfing the rooftop where they crouched.

"W-what did you see in the glass when you looked?" said Demmory.

Lawson only whimpered. The whiteness around them became so absolute that he couldn't even see Demmory... even though Demmory's hand was clasping his shoulder.

"Lawson, what did you see?" Demmory repeated... the edge of fear rising in his voice. "Lawson!"

"I saw... I saw..."

"WHAT!"

"...slaves..."

"A revolt! Is THAT all this is? Those damned animals-"

"...d-dead... slaves..."

"You saw wWWWAAAAA-"

Suddenly, Demmory's hand snatched away from Lawson's shoulder... snatched away so fast that it left bruises.

"...D-demmory?" said Lawson.

There was a reply... but not in words. It was a sound. A cracking sound.... a cracking, followed by a wet ripping...

Lawson drew his sword and prodded the air around him tentatively. He could see nothing... his sword touched nothing.

SNAP!

He turned toward the sound. He took a step.

CRAK!
sssllurrrp...

He adjusted his direction and swung his sword... not in a strike, but in a gentle waving motion, so as not to accidentally hit Demmory.

He needn't have worried.

There was a brief gust of wind, as if something had just flown past him. Whatever it was disturbed the fog just enough for Lawson to see... not three feet in front of him... Demmory's dismembered body being greedily consumed by some hideous decomposing THING! A dog-beast with teeth like twisted daggers and eyes as white as the glowing fog. The demonic hound raised its head from Demmory's half-eaten corpse and smiled at Lawson with bloody teeth.

And then the fog slammed back into place around him like a curtain drawing between him and the scene he'd just witnessed. But there was no curtain... there was nothing between him and the snarling beast but air...

Lawson turned and ran... he ran as fast as he could...

...right off the edge of the roof.

"AAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEIIIII!!" He screamed as gravity claimed him. He saw nothing as he fell.... just an empty whiteness that lead him believe for just a few seconds that there was no ground below him... that he would just keep falling and falling and-

KRACK-THUD!

The shattering of his legs disabused him of that notion rather suddenly... just as the clicking of claws approaching his crumpled body killed the ill-concieved hope that he'd survive with merely a few broken bones. He could still see nothing at all.... but he heard breathing. Suddenly, something foul and wet dragged across his face.

A tongue.

He had just been tasted.

And now, it was time to feed.

-CRUNCH-

"AAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!"

-CRUNCH-

...silence...


---

"WHO was that!?" Master Ellis demanded when the scream pierced the uneasy silence. The courtyard, crowded with guards and overseers... and even a few house slaves... was surrounded. The only thing visible beyond it was white wall of fog that was slowly... slowly... oozing past the shrubs. The scream came suddenly, and vanished just as quick. "WHO'S UP THERE!"

"Demmory and Lawson were," said one of the guards. "That sounded like Lawson. I thing we should get back inside, sir..."

"BAH! I DEMAND to know what is going on! And WHERE are my slaves! Someone go out there and check on my PROPERTY!"

"No offense sir," said a nearby overseer. "But if you're that worried about your property, maybe you should go out there and see about 'em your DAMNED SELF!"

"WHAT!? YOU'RE FIRED!"

"Good," the overseer spat.

"GUARDS! REMOVE this man-"

"AAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA!"

The laugh flew out of the fog like an invisible bat that circled the courtyard. All eyes turned toward the fog, which had suddenly began moving forward... thrusting into the courtyard and expanding to completely dominate one end of it. The crowd moved back. More men emerged from the mansion and joined with the ones already present. Twenty armed guards formed a line of swords and crossbows stretching across the diameter of the elliptical yard. They stood waiting, as Ellis took a few tentative steps back toward the mansion's main door.

"We should get you inside," said another guard. Before Ellis could agree, several large shapes leapt out of the fog-

ARRRRROOOOOOOOOOO!

Dogs.

Twelve of Harriek's huge, twisted animals came screaming toward the line of guards. The guards did a double-take as the decomposing things came at them with fangs bared and eyes gleaming. Bolts flew from crossbows... all struck home, but none did anything to slow the beasts' approach. A second volley proved equally ineffective... and by the time the last bolt left its weapon, the attackers were too close for another round. The guards moved to engage the attackers up close, confident that they could overwhelm the beasts with numbers, skill, and weapons. Their confidence turned to horror as the first sword struck the first beast: The blade sank deep into spongy putrefying flesh even as the dog bit off the arm of the man who'd swung the weapon.

What followed was a massacre of nightmarish intensity. The guards scattered before the undead onslaught... some running, some fighting. All dying. Their weapons were useless against beasts who could feel no pain... and who's jaws could shatter a human thigh-bone with a single bite. One guard managed to behead a leaping beast, only to discover that the headless corpse still had sharp claws that could shred flesh even as the head tumbled back into the fog. That guard's dying scream sent the overseers scurrying back toward the mansion. They had taken position behind the guards... but when the line of defense was so easily broken, they ran.

Most of them ran immediately, but Grady paused long enough to snatch up a fallen guard's sword.

"GET INTO THE HOUSE!" he shouted. "GO! GO!"

RRRROOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

One of the foul beasts leapt for Grady's throat. The Overseer spun and slashed... the sword passed easily through the thing's soft flesh, slicing it in half down the middle. Both halves hit the cobblestones beside him... but the FRONT half was still upright, balancing on two legs and snarling furiously.

"...ya gotta be kiddin me!"

The half-dog could not leap, but it still yearned for flesh. It trotted toward Grady with jerking, awkward movements that were grotesquely humorous and sinister all at once. Grady buried his sword in the creature's head. The half-dog didn't seem to notice that half of its brain was now resting on the cobblestones along with its rear legs. It was still hungry.... still snarling...

"MOVE! GET OUTTA THE WAAAYY!!"

A frantically fleeing guard collided with Grady, knocking both men to the ground. The guard had the misfortune of landing near the half-dog. The beast quickly tore out the man's throat and began to feed. Everything it swallowed promptly tumbled out the other end of the severed torso, creating a neat pile of chewed raw meat. Grady turned away from the sight... and discovered what the guard had been running from-

Something else was coming out of the fog.

Something with the shape of a man, but with waves of hatred and evil radiating so thickly off of him that even Grady's skin went cold at the sight. The man was a slave, but no slave that Grady had ever seen. The fog trailed behind him as he walked... marking his path in a billowing curtain of white that he drew slowly across the courtyard. He waded confidently through the remains of the quick and deadly battle. The dogs... and pieces of dogs... were all feeding noisily on the guards. He passed the whipping post... the bane of every slave on the farm... without giving it a single glance. It was as if the instrument of torture did not exist for him... and yet the blood-soaked post burst into violent orange flames the instant the slave passed it. The fire threw dark shadows up into the air... shadows that detached themselves from their source and fell in behind the dark man like soldiers assembling behind a banner of war.

The few living people left in the courtyard were all sprinting for the mansion doors by now... even as Ellis's guards were swinging those massive doors closed.

"WHOOOAAAA!" Grady shouted. He slid in between the door an instant before the guards slammed them shut. They slid a four-inch thick iron bar across both doors and secured it with chains and locks. Then ten men, armed with swords and shields, lined up across the hallway.

"What's going ON out there!" Jallan called. The alchemist came scampering down the marble hallway, with his apprentice not far behind. "Grady, what's happening! Ellis just ran through here like a bat out of hell-"

"Where'd he go!?" Grady demanded.

"The guards took him and the other family to the ballroom-" Nathaniel began.

"Then THATS where we need to be! That bastard's got a secret tunnel out of here... heard Percy bragging about it one night! The mansion is surrounded and that's our only way out!"

"WHY!? What's HAPPENING!"

With a single incredible strike, the huge mansion doors flew from their hinges... snapping the chains and the iron bar that held them in place... and thundered down the hallway right into the midst of the guards. Several of the men were too slow in dodging the flying doors, and were crushed beneath them when they fell. The shouts of the injured and dying were joined with the wails of vengeance as Hell itself surged into the Ellis mansion.

The fog poured through the doorway like a white flood... then it paused briefly and spat forth a single figure... the thin, dark-skinned slave that Grady had seen in the courtyard. The dark man walked confidently down the wide marble corridor as other shapes emerged from the fog behind him.

The dogs came first.

The snarling, half-rotten beasts scattered across the hallway, attacking and devouring everything they saw. There were several guards trapped halfway under the fallen doors... with one or both legs crushed beneath the immovable weight. The hounds swarmed over them like ants, viciously tearing off chunks of flesh from the defenseless men. One guard used his sword... not as a weapon, but as a knife to saw off his own leg so he could escape. He was devoured before the job was even half-done.

And then the fog gave birth to new horrors. Slivers of white and darkness shot out of the cloud and began circling the hallway, screeching and howling and scratching deep gouges into the marble columns with their ephemeral claws. They were souls... and they had come to see their vengeance done this night.

Guards and overseers scattered... they shot back and forth across the hallway, running for whatever safety they could think of. But there was no safety. The angry souls pointed them out, screaming with unholy fury at whatever door the men hid behind. Then the dogs would come and bash down their sanctuaries... dragging out whoever they found and consuming them with cruel, voracious efficiency. Only the slaves were safe. The House servants cowered in terror all along the hallway, but the dogs never saw them. The spirits never pointed them out. The dogs bounded up the stairs and crashed through the locked doors leading to the wine cellar, spreading their bloody carnage to every corner of the house. The souls guided them; where the screaming souls went, the hounds followed... with the shrieks of the dying never far behind.

And in the midst of it all, the dark slave loomed like a grand conductor... orchestrating the horror around him with a white-toothed smile and a barely-visible nod. He walked slowly toward the second set of double doors at the end of the hall... the ballroom. Moving as if he were in no hurry at all... as if he didn't want to miss a single minute of the bloody carnival he had created in the House of Ellis.

The slaves looked away as he passed preferring instead to watch the hounds at work than lay eyes on the king of the bankita... for he had the 'disu difwa'... the power to damn them, body AND soul, with but a glance. The older slaves muttered prayers and made holy signs in his presence. The younger ones simply shivered... or gasped at the sight of that which, until now, was only a myth passed down from their grandmothers.

"It is the Spirit King!" one young slave shouted. He rose from his hiding place and immediately fell back down to his knees in prayer. "He has come to FREE us!"

At those words... and at those words ONLY... the dark man paused. He stopped and turned his gaze upon the young slave. He said nothing. He did nothing. He merely chuckled... his thin chest rippling with laughter, lips curling up into a smile... before turning away and continuing down the hall.

Grady, Jallan, and Nathaniel were already at the door. A second ago, they had seen a group of guards escorting Ellis's wife into the ballroom, but the guards quickly slammed and locked the doors an instant before Grady's huge fist pounded on the hard, metal-reinforced wood.

"HEYYY!!" The Overseer shouted. "LET US IN!! LET US IN, DAMMIT!"

"Nooo!" Ellis' frightened voice said on the other side of the door. "Don't open the door!"

"It's GRADY, Dammit!"

"AND JALLAN!" the alchemist added. "LET US IN!"

"WE can't!" a guard shouted. "We have to keep the family safe!"

"But what about US!?!?!" Jallan cried. "WHAT ABOUT US!"

"I'm SORRY!" the guard replied.

"OPEN THE GODS-DAMNED DOOR!" Grady roared. He backed up and rammed the door with his shoulder. He was strong... but not that strong. He tried again, with an identical lack of result. "LET US IN!"

"NO!" Ellis screamed. His voice was nearly drowned out by the screams of women and children on the other side of the door. Every Ellis in the House was in there with him. Except for Nathaniel, of course. He was just a bastard... he could live in the house and earn his keep, but in the case of a slave revolt or other emergency, he was expendable... just like every other servant. "KEEP THAT DOOR LOCKED!"

"ELLIS, YOU BASTARD!"

"You have to understand," Ellis shouted. "I have my FAMILY to protect! THE DOOR IS SEALED! I CAN'T RISK OPENING IT! We might not be able to seal it BACK before-"

"DAMN YOU!"

"He's not going to let us in," Nathaniel said. The calm in his voice was almost as unsettling as what was coming down the hall toward them.

"That's what HE thinks!" Jallan spat. The alchemist began searching through the multitude of deep pockets in his robe.

"No time for a drink now, old man," said Grady. The Overseer pointed...

A thin, admittance white shape flew up to them and hovered in the air before their eyes. It looked at them with sad, sad eyes, then it turned back and shrieked.

"HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRREEE!"

Not far down the hall, a rotted dog removed its head from an overseer's gutted torso. It still had an unidentifiable organ clenched in its teeth, but when it heard the ghost's cry, it swallowed the lump of flesh and began galloping down the hall... glaring eyes fixed firmly on Grady, Jallan and Nathaniel.

Several other dogs joined the charge.

"This is it, then," said Grady. He was still holding the sword he'd found outside. He held it ready. "We're done."

"Not yet we aren't... Nathaniel, help me with this..." The alchemist had produced a tube of some thick, oily ointment which he and Nathaniel quickly spread over the door in a small circular pattern around the lock. Nathaniel produced a flint... he held it near the door. "Close your eyes, Mr. Grady," the alchemist said.

"I'll meet my death like a man, thank you very much," Grady snapped.

"Suit yourself. Light it, Nathan-"

Nathaniel struck the flint on the door's metal latch. The spark ignited the ointment... Nathaniel barely had enough time to yank his hand out of the way before-

fssssss-FLASH!

There was no explosion, but instead, there was a blast of blindingly bright light as the ointment reacted... throwing off a burst of white heat that burnt right through the door... and the lock... and the metal bar on the other side of the door... and the guard's fingers that were holding the bar in place.

"-AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGH!" the guard screamed.

"YAH!" Grady kicked the ballroom door open and stormed into the large room beyond. Jallan and Nathaniel were right behind them.

And the dogs were right behind THEM.

"YOU FOOLS!" old man Ellis screamed. The entire Ellis household was there. Old man Ellis, his wife, his youngest son David, and his three daughters... one of them only a year old. They were all cowering in the rear of the room... near the small sunken pit where the orchestra played during Ellis' parties. A ring of guards surrounding them. "YOU'VE DAMNED US ALL!"

"THAT DOOR WOULDN'T HAVE STOPPED THEM ANYWAY!" Grady replied as he ran past the empty tables. "WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!" The ballroom's other doors all lead to the kitchen or the servant's areas... except for one. One hidden door, behind the orchestra pit, lead straight down into a dark passage that snaked its way under the house... under the stables... and out past the outer edge of the farm. It was the emergency escape... in case the mansion and the ballroom were breached by angry slaves. Grady certainly thought that the current situation qualified. Just as he reached the hatch, the first dog bounded into the ballroom. The guards all charged it... three of them shoved it back with their shields while three more stabbed at it with swords and spears. They'd driven the beast almost back through the ruined ballroom door when two more dogs joined the fight. One hound slammed into the first dog from behind... its momentum broke through the guards and sent both dogs and guards spilling into the ballroom. The third hound leapt over the guards and landed near the middle of the room.

ROOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Four guards surrounded it.

"Out! Out Out!" Ellis screamed. "Evacuate the house!" He lead his family toward the escape hatch, where Grady, Jallan and Nathaniel were already gathered. The hatch was secured with a sturdy lock, which Nathaniel quickly burnt away with more of Jallan's chemicals. He lacked the strength to lift the heavy metal door, however. Grady grasped the ring in the door's surface and yanked it up-

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!"

A screeching, howling column of white exploded out of the hole... a flood of human souls roared in protest as they surged into the room through the only remaining exit.

"YAAAAAAA!!!!" Jallan screamed.

"Get DOWN! GET DOWN!" Grady shouted. Everyone dropped to the floor as the angry spirits tore back and forth through the air above them. Grady reached for the escape hatch, but something slashed at his hand, opening his forearm with four deep gouges that burned like acid. "ARRRRRRRRRGGH!"

"What now!!?" said Jallan.

"You're asking ME!?" Grady hissed.

All around them, the guards were being torn apart by the hounds... and by the angry spirits that were still pouring into the room. And at the ballroom door, a dark figure had just arrived. He walked into the room, and the spirits all shrieked at his presence. He looked around at the chaos...

"GET HIM!" Ellis ordered. "GET THAT MAN! HE'S CONTROLLING ALL THIS!!"

"ATTACK!!"

Several guards had succeeded in chopping one of the hounds into small, non-threatening pieces while only getting two men killed in the process. The three remaining men charged the dark man. He turned toward them and pointed-

"Mai-ja-Chikki!" he shouted.

Two of the guards fell to the floor, clasping their swelling stomachs and screaming in agony as flesh-eating worms began consuming them from the inside out.

The third man paused. He dropped his sword and quickly loaded his crossbow.

"Mahalbiya!" the dark man spat. Sores and ulcers appeared over the man's face and hands... the wounds were so dense and hideous, and had appeared so suddenly, that it looked as if the man's skin had literally crawled off of his body... which it in fact DID just a few seconds later.

The dark man did not stop. Smiling widely, he looked around the room, pointing at the guards and shouting words at them... and with each word of power, he unleashed a terrible death upon those who dared protect the cowering Ellis family.

"Ba-Toye!"

-a guard burst into flame and ran screaming from the room... with a rotted dog in close pursuit.

"Yerro! Bidda!"

-another guard's joints suddenly swelled and locked into place, leaving him paralyzed and helpless before the hound that he had been fighting. So complete was the paralysis that he couldn't even scream as the thing tore off his limbs and devoured them one at a time.

"Rako!"

-yet another man... a young guard... withered and died of old age right before Ellis' startled eyes.

And then, as the last of the guards either died or fled the room in terror, the dark man turned his eyes on the Ellis family itself. The snarling dogs had the entire clan backed up against a wall... along with Grady, Jallan, and Nathaniel, but, so far the monsters had not attacked. They were waiting.

But Belinda Ellis... the second oldest and most unattractive of the hideous Ellis daughters... was NOT waiting. She got to her feet and ran for the door, her wiry legs carrying her past the hounds before anyone could grab her. And she wasn't alone.... she was holding her one year old sister Elysia, in her arms.

One of the hounds peeled away from the Ellis family and chased the fleeing females.

"BELINDA!" old man Ellis shouted. "No! Not my daughters! They're innocent!"

The dark man said his first words since entering the mansion.

"N'Doki cares not for innocence..." He pointed at Belinda. "Bankita!"

The vengeful spirits that had been circling the perimeter of the room poured down upon Belinda... they slashed her legs out from under her and then snatched the screaming baby from her arms as she fell. The hound was upon her before she could draw breath to scream. The spirits held Elysia Ellis safe above the carnage as her elder sister became another meal for the undead thing.

"MY BABY!" Charolette Ellis cried.

"Get DOWN, woman!" Ellis spat, trying to drag his wife back down to the floor, where he himself still cowered.

"The BABY! PLEASE DON'T HURT THE BABY!"

"No?" said N'Doki. He smiled, and spoke again. But the words that came were not his own voice. Perhaps it was a cruel joke... or another form of torment... but it when N'Doki next opened his mouth, it was the voice of PERCY ELLIS that spilled from his lips, repeating the same words that Percy had spoken that very morning: "From NOW on.... For every ONE Of you that runs away, there will be TWO ropes on the Hanging Tree. One for YOU... and one for a member of your FAMILY! Think about the person you love MOST... your mother... your sister... and watch THIS!" The voice suddenly changed back to N'Doki's deep rumble. "BANKITA!"

"NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

The spirits circled the room, dragging the baby through the air with them as they gained speed...

...then they left. They flew through the wall, departing for a destination known only to them. They took the child with them... or they WOULD have, if the flesh-and-blood child were capable of flying through walls. But she wasn't. The child smacked against the cold stone and fell to the floor with a faint thump.

Charolette Ellis screamed in a high voice that sounded almost like a tea kettle... and then she fainted away into merciful unconscious.

"YOU BASTARD!" Ellis screamed, finally getting to his feet. "HOW COULD YOU DO THAT!"

"How could YOU?" said N'Doki he walked toward Ellis. The old man backed away until his back was on the wall.

"...I'd sell my soul for a crossbow..." said Grady. Jallan was smearing something on the Overseer's wounded arm... an arm that was still sizzling from where the angry spirit had touched him. Grady tried to get up, but Jallan held him.

"Don't be a FOOL, man!" the alchemist hissed. "Stay low!"

Grady thought for a moment and decided that the alchemist was right. Besides... the spirits were gone. The only thing between them and the escape hatch was a very large and very hungry... and very dead... dog. The animal was standing almost on top of the hatch... but if it moved, they would have a chance of escaping.

But then, if the dog moved, it would probably be on its way to tear them apart.

The other dogs in the room circled them. They all looked hungry.

"Blood calls for blood," N'Doki said as he strolled past the ring of undead hounds, still approaching the old man. On one side of Ellis lay Charolette's unconscious body. On the other side, his daughter Lucinda Ellis held his youngest son David in her arms as they crouched at their father's feet. N'Doki smiled. "Torment calls for torment!"

Ellis looked around frantically... but he saw no weapons and no escape. He glanced longingly at the ballroom door, and the bloody hallway beyond... as he expected Percy or Hawthorne to come rushing in to save them all. But despite his prayers, neither son appeared to rescue them.

"Grady!" he hissed. "Grady do something!"

Grady did nothing. Ellis turned on him.

"THERE!" The old man pointed at Grady. "THERE'S the one you want! HE'S done more than I've EVER done! I'M just an owner! A BUSINESSMAN! But HIM... HE's an overseer! Take HIM! Him AND the alchemist! Take them BOTH! THEY'RE the ones you want!"

"HAHAHAHAAAA!" N'Doki laughed.

The dogs began to move forward... forcing Grady and the others back toward Ellis.

"Daddy, PLEASE! I'm SCARED!" Lucinda Ellis cried.

"TAKE THE OVERSEER!" Ellis screamed... his voice suddenly sounding very much like Lucinda's. "No! You... you want ELLIS blood! Take the BOY!" Ellis pointed at Nathaniel. "HE'S an Ellis! Take HIM and leave the rest of us alone!"

"Do you fear me, Ellis?" N'Doki said as the dogs crept closer.

Ellis stared at the dogs, and then at the man who commanded them.

"NO!" he shouted. "I'm NOT afraid of you, YOU BASTARD-"

ROOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

"Daddeee!"

One of the dead hounds... the largest one... threw its rotted self across the room and pinned old man Ellis to the wall. Its huge, clawed paws rested on Ellis' shoulders... its slavering, blood jaws hung in the air mere inches from the old man's face.

"YES!" Ellis screamed... his voice going higher and higher in pitch with every syllable. "Y-Yes! I'm T-TERRIFIED! I-is THAT what you WANT!"

"But why fear N'Doki?" said the dark man, speaking with the strange accent that dated back to the FIRST generation of slaves... to the FIRST men and women to feel an overseer's lash. "When N'Doki is but a servant of dose who you haf slaughtered for generations! De women dat you savage... dey can do not'ing to saf demselves. De children dat you destroy... dey cannot fight back. De old men dat you maim, DEY can do not'ing but endure and die. But de dead... yes, de dead, DEY have de power dat you fear! De spirits of de DEAD haf felt your evil for DEMSELVES and haf said ENOUGH! DEY cry out for BLOOD! For VENGEANCE! And for DIS, de Spirit King sends his servant... to bring to you his WRATH and his WARNING! You have SEEN de Wrath! NOW come de WARNING!"

The hound in front of Ellis growled and opened its mouth... its mighty jaws fell wide... and wider... and wider still... opening impossibly, like the unhinged jaws of a snake. Old man Ellis screamed, thinking that undead hound intended to swallow him whole.

But when he looked down the beast's throat, he wished... he PRAYED that the thing DID kill him. He prayed to every god that he had ever heard of that this undead creature would bite his face from his skull so that he wouldn't have to see down beast's rotting throat... down into its decomposing gut.

For there, staring back up at him from deep within the belly of the beast, was hell.

Ellis saw.

Unending eons of torment. Agony beyond description... wave after wave of shrieking images that made N'Doki's carnival of carnage seem like a vision of heaven itself. It was a roiling, twisting landscape of razor sharp, white-hot screams being pulled from the flayed souls of the damned by things so grotesque that to LOOK at them was agony in itself. It was a place of spinning, cutting, wrenching, twisting, dismembering TORMENT that washed over everything in slicing dark waves that stretched for a thousand eternities... all folded into a single blade that was but one of a billion billion knives slicing at the exposed nerves of the damned... their skin and flesh distorted into wide grotesque shapes, then held there with needles and spikes carved out of their own bones. And every scream and every shudder, whether manifested or merely thought, multiplied the pain a thousand fold until their minds could take no more... but in Hell there was no insanity... no blissful sleep of unconsciousness. The pain... the torment... the afflictions of the soul and mind and body... went on and on... growing more intense with every instant... with every falling grain of sand in a heaping mountain of time that stretched from eternity to eternity and beyond. And right at the heart of it all was a retched tumor of torment that had been ripped out and pounded flat so that Ellis could see the tortured specks that composed it... specks that had the grotesquely twisted, yet clearly recognizable features of Horatio Ellis... and Ian Ellis... and Shannon Ellis and every Ellis that had come before or after on down to his parents Jacob and Matilda Ellis and... and even PERCY! Dear Gods, the things they were doing to PERCY!!!! And right beside him was an empty space that had the perfect size and shape of old man Ellis' tiny, warped soul... waiting for him to take his place beside his tortured son...

...Ellis saw it all. All of it. The vision of hell came at him in one tremendous flash so powerful that Ellis' eyes shriveled in their sockets from the very sight. His bladder and bowels released explosively as his mind CRACKED open to receive the enormity of what awaited him in the afterlife. Ellis slid to the floor with a whimper and lay trembling in a stinking puddle. His mind would eventually piece itself back together, but the old man would never be quite the same. His days would be filled with blind misery, and his nights with terror as his fractured mind summoned the visions and the tormented screams... the screams of every Ellis who had ever died... to taunt him from the last light of day to the first crack of dawn... every night... for the rest of his pitiful life.

But for now, all he could do was stare up at N'Doki and tremble at the dark man's voice.

"De warning be served... and N'Doki's task be done. For now...." He turned his gaze to Grady and the others. "But know dis... out of your evil will come somet'ing of great power! If you continue your evil... as de spirits already say dat you will... dis t'ing of power will return to strike you down wit a vengeance dat be denied here today! And on dat day, when you stare your destruction in de eyes, it be N'DOKI'S face dat stare back at you! HA!"

N'Doki spat upon the floor... and the glob of spittle formed into a shiny black scorpion that scurried hungrily toward Grady. All eyes were on the deadly insect when Grady brought his boot down, crushing it back into the liquid from which it had arisen. But when the drop of Grady's boot rang out, the half-decomposed dogs... every one of them... exploded in a spray of filth that covered the ballroom and its occupants with gore and maggots.

Everyone screamed and cursed as the maggots wiggled through hair and clothing, seeking various bodily orifices in which to hide.

But the dogs were gone. And so was N'Doki.

When the survivors looked up... the room was empty except for the corpses, the blood, and the maggots.

"He... he left us..." said Grady. "He left us alone!"

"I don't think he CAME here for us," said the alchemist. "I think... I think that's someone else's job..."

"Oh yeah?" said Grady. "Who-"

BOOOOOM!!

The house shook with an explosion so tremendous that several of the marble columns in the hallway crumbled and fell... adding even more violence to the already shuddering mansion. The survivors.... slaves, employees, and the few Ellis family members that were still alive... scrambled out of the house for fear of their lives. What awaited them outside was something straight out of the religious prattlings of the Order Illumitat:

The night had turned into day... not because of some astronomical event, but from the light of the blazing inferno... the towering spire of flame that leapt skyward from the top of the small hill adjacent to the mansion.

The Hanging Tree.

The ground had opened beneath it and spat forth a column of fire all around the ancient tree. The fire burned red hot, with occasional flashes of blue and white. The evil Tree died slowly in the flames... as if the fire were torturing it by not consuming it at a natural pace. No, this fire would burn all night and well into the next day until finally it would vanish... leaving not one stick, not one twig... not one root or SPECK of bark from the damnable Tree. All of it... the entire great monument to the Ellis' cruelty... would be ash...

Things would change after that.

While the whole truth of what had happen would never be truly known... and much of what WAS known would be disputed... The Order Illumitat would use the 'Ellis Event' as reason enough to expand their power over the city and its inhabitants. At least for a little while. Their own corruption would limit them only a mild usefullness, however, and would keep them from ever doing anything effective in finding and destroying the mysterious 'Spirit King.' They would, however, succeed in stirring up the predictable panic surrounding slaves and magic. As it did after the Insurrection generations ago, all magic became legally restricted to the Order and the Nobles... with rare exceptions for a certain notorious alchemist and his apprentice, who... for a while... suffered under a distinct lack of fresh subjects for their experiments. It didn't last long. Frightened farmowners would use the event as reason to sell their slaves and move away... opening up new opportunities for men of money who wished to expand their own considerable fortunes. For men like Hawthorne Ellis, it was a golden age of cheap land and cheaper slaves... slaves that had to be controlled with a much tighter grasp than before. There were no more house slaves. There were no more root-healers. Any slave who even mentioned the Spirit King... or spoke in a language other than that of their master.... or behaved strangely or who wondered aloud what ever happened to the two missing Ellis slaves... were taken for interrogation by the Order. Those slaves were never seen again, although the alchemist Jallan, or his apprentice, could sometimes be seen sneaking around the Temple on nights following such interrogations. Predictably... overseers, guards and laborers became harder to come by for a while. Also predictably, their ranks filled again as people slowly grew tired of starving.

After all, slavery was the beating heart that fueled the economy. The Great Insurrection hadn't change that... and neither would a few whispered tales about things that may or may not have happened on the Ellis farm on the night old man Ellis went blind and crazy... the night the Hanging Tree burnt down. Yes, things would change...

...but only the details. The whole of what came after would bear a striking resemblance to what had come before. Only the names and faces... SOME of them, at least... would be different.

But for now the tree still burned brightly, shooting fire and smoke and odd, writhing shadows high into the sky. The flames towered over the mansion itself, stretching so high that their ominous glow could be seen from all the surrounding farms and even from the farway city itself. They were especially visible on the far side of the forest surrounding the Ellis farm... where a young girl had stopped to cleanse herself in a stream before continuing on. Bethsaida looked back toward the farm, gazed up at the pillar of fire looming above the trees, and wondered what had happened. Had the Spirit King come? Were they all dead now?

She decided that it didn't matter. It FELT like it should matter... like maybe it was important enough to go back and see for herself what had happened. But that would be foolish. Nothing back there had anything to do with her. Not any more. She turned away from the fiery sign in the sky and washed the remaining blood from her body. Then she waded into the water and started across the stream. She didn't know exactly where... or how far... but somewhere over there past the opposite shore... was freedom.

It was a pity that she couldn't bring her soul along with her.

But it was of no consequence... she probably wouldn't need it anyway...



[The End?? You know better than that...]