“The Black Pig has taken him!” A despairing cry rang in his head, a childhood memory—an old woman of the Dales, cursing her son’s untimely death. “Curse the pig and curse his coldhearted master!” she had screeched. “Never will I light a candle for the Kerneia again!”

Kerneia. In a faraway land where the sun still rose and set, the crowds were likely gathering on the streets of Southmarch to watch the statue of the masked god go by, carried high on a litter. They would be drunk, even early in the morning—the litter-bearers, the crowds, even the Earthfather’s priests, a deep, laughing-sad drunkenness that Vansen remembered well, the entire city like a funeral feast that had gone on too long. But here he was instead in the heart of the Earthfather’s domain, being dragged to the god’s very door!

A fever-chill swept over him and Vansen had to fight to keep from stumbling. He wished he could reach out to the prince, remind Barrick Eddon that he was not alone in this terrible place, but his shackles prevented it.

The way into the cavern that held the god’s gate suddenly opened wide before them. The enormous chamber was lit by a mere dozen torches, its obsidian walls only delicately streaked with light and the ceiling altogether lost in darkness, but after the long trip through pitch-black tunnels Ferras Vansen found it as overwhelming as the great Trigon Temple in Southmarch on a bright afternoon, with color streaming down from its high windows. The gate itself was even more massive than it had seemed through the eyes of Gyir’s spies, a rectangular slab of darkness as tall as a cliff, resembling an ordinary portal only in the way that the famous bronze colossus of Perin was like a living mortal man.

The guards prodded Vansen and the others toward the open area near the base of the exposed rock face. The slaves already assembled there, a pathetic, hollow-eyed and listless crowd watched over by what seemed almost as many guards as prisoners, shuffled meekly out of the captives’ way, clearing an even larger space in front of the monstrous doorway.

The guards shoved the prisoners to their knees. Vansen wallowed in drifts of stone dust, sneezing as it billowed up around him like smoke and Barrick collapsed beside him as though arrow-shot, scarcely stirring. Vansen nudged the youth, trying to see if he had been injured somehow, but with the heavy wooden shackles around his wrists he could not move much without falling over.

Remember what I said…

Even as Gyir’s words sounded in Ferras Vansen’s skull, guards and workers began to stir all over the room—for a moment he thought that they had also heard the fairy’s thoughts. Then he heard a thunderous, uneven rhythm like the pounding of a mighty drum. When he realized he was hearing footfalls, he knew why the guards, even those whom nature had made helplessly crooked, suddenly tried to straighten, and why all the kneeling slaves began to moan and shove their faces against the rough floor of the great cavern.