He unhooked and ventured forward, then looked back over his shoulder. Scar had fallen into a stupor, head tucked under a wing. The reckless anger that had scarred his youth slammed back in all of its bitter fury. He’d killed two men today, stuck them like pigs. A battle had been fought, and many had died, and even if he wasn’t sure the enemy soldiers didn’t entirely deserve death after the misery they had no doubt inflicted on others far more innocent, he still could not wipe the taste from his tongue. He did not like the world as it had become. But that didn’t mean he could ignore it.

To the hells with the laws! What did it matter, when his dreams in the form of Marit whispered that Guardians walked again in the world to seek justice, and meanwhile those who met Guardians in the living world called them demons?

The path shone faintly. He set one foot down, followed with the second, and walked into the maze on the trail of a thing he could not explain. At each turn he looked onto a new vista, a distant landscape: smooth ocean waves; a ruined tower sited above a tumble of rocks which, before it flashed out of view, he recognized as Everfall Beacon; a tangled forest that was surely the Wild; the flat gleam of the Olo’o Sea just turning out of the shadows into the dawn’s light.

The visions made him dizzy. Voices whispered urgently.

“. . . I escaped from Indiyabu . . . she has corrupted them, thus are we lost . . . surely not, for if we keep our strength and our heart within us, we can still fight back . . . it is not possible for me to struggle any longer, take the mirror and give it to the one who returns in my place.”

Don’t turn your back, Marshal Alard had been used to say, but Joss could not bring himself to see if ghosts crowded behind him, murmuring in his ear.

He stumbled into a depression in the center of the labyrinth. A woman waited, plump, dark, attractive, smiling but with sorrow awake in her eyes, her hands talking in the secret language of the Guardians. He walked through her before he realized she wasn’t there. The rock sloped sharply into a bowl-like hollow. Light flashed, blinding him. An unknown force spun him halfway around.

Aui! He clawed at rock as the ground gave way beneath his feet.

He clung to one side of the ridge, a finger’s clutch away from falling to his death into the trees below. He’d been tossed out. He’d broken the boundaries once again.