At times, between the long moments when he was unaware of anything, he hurt quite enough to be in Hell, but Hell was cold and dark, and he wasn’t cold. And the few times he was able to open his eyes, the room he was in was bathed in sunlight.

He couldn’t be in Heaven either; if he was in Heaven, he wouldn’t hurt. That was one thing that everyone agreed on; in Heaven was an end to all pain and sorrow. Pain he had in plenty, and as for sorrow—well, he’d consider sorrow when the pain ended.

Therefore, he must be alive.

The rest of what was going on around him—well. It was a mix of what he thought was hallucination, and what surely must be madness. Now, that fit with Hell, except that there weren’t any demons tormenting him, only his own flesh.

Around him, voices muttered in a tongue he did not understand, but inside his head, another voice murmured, imparting to him the sense of what he heard. And that was where the madness came in. That voice, low and strong and uncompromisingly masculine, informed him that he, Alberich, sworn to the service of Karse and Vkandis Sunlord, the One God—

—was now a Herald of Valdemar. And the voice belonged to his Companion, one Kantor.

Impossible.

Not at all, the voice insisted. It began to wear at his stubborn refusal; he could feel his objection thinning. It clearly was not impossible because it had happened. He might not like it, but it was not impossible.

He slept, woke hurting, was murmured over and moved, fed and cleaned, the pain ebbed, and he slept again. From time to time the bandages on his face were taken off and he could open his eyes for a little. He was in a cheerful room that seemed to be tiled, and the bed he was on was soft and comfortable—which was good, because his face and arms were in agony, his lungs stabbed with every breath he took, and if he didn’t have broken collarbones, they were at least cracked. When he could see, there were generally two or three green-clad people in the room with him, and he seemed to recall that outside of Karse, there were Healers who generally wore green. So apparently—if he wasn’t delirious—he was being tended to, outside of Karse, by foreign Healers. So whatever had happened, he wasn’t in Heaven, or Hell, or prison—which had been a third option, after all. Over and over he slept to wake in pain, was given something that stopped the pain, and slept again; there was no way to tell how much time had passed, and no way to sort what he knew had happened from what the voice was telling him.