Something grabbed at his arm. Vansen kicked out and one of the stinking, shaggy guards fell back, but got up immediately and came toward him again. Fighting the inevitable, Vansen managed to land another kick (to even less effect) before he saw that something was strange about the creature’s expression. The apelike face was slack, and the eyes wandered lazily, fixed on nothing, as though the guard were blind. It was also holding a key in its clumsy, clawed hand.

If they want me unshackled before they kill me then it only means I’ll take some of them with me. But why would they want to take that risk? As the creature fumbled roughly with the shackles, he suddenly realized he had seen that befuddled expression before on the creatures Gyir had controlled. Vansen looked to the fairy. The Storm Lantern was staring up into nothingness, squinting so hard in concerntration that his eyes were little more than creases. Another guard stood behind Gyir, doing something with his bonds as well, but even if the fairy was controlling them both, time was running out.

The guards had dragged Prince Barrick to a spot just before the mighty doors which stretched above them higher and wider than the front of the great temple in Southmarch. Ueni’ssoh, the terrible, cadaverous gray man, walked slowly up to stand beside them and raised his skeletal hands in the air.

“O Fire-Eyed, White-Winged, hear us through the empty places!” he intoned in his harsh, unfeeling voice, “O Pale Question, grant us audience!”

Vansen could understand every word, but the tongue was nothing he had ever heard before, as inhuman as the sawing of a cricket: the sound of the gray man’s fluid speech was in Vansen’s ears, all tick and slur, but the meaning was in his head.

“O Emperor of Worms, see us through all darknesses!” Ueni’ssoh sang, “O Empty Box, grant us audience!”

The gray man’s voice now rose, or gained some other power, because it seemed to fill Ferras Vansen’s head like water poured splashing into a bowl, louder and louder until he could scarcely think, although the actual tones seemed as measured and unhurried as before. This was no song of Kerneia that he had ever heard, but Vansen thought he recognized a few words here and there, the ancient words of mourning his grandfather had sung at his grandmother’s grave in the hills, but the gray man’s terrible, flat voice made Ferras Vansen see pictures in his head that had nothing to do with his long-dead grandmother or his father’s burial plot. A crimson-lit world of scuttling shadows filled his thoughts, an end to all things so final and so terrible that it lay on his heart like an immense weight.

The fairy-spelled guard still scrabbled at his shackles. Vansen was not free yet—he could not let the voice overwhelm him. He could not fail.

“See now where the darkness twists in us like a river
It is time to get up and go to the land of the Red Sunlight
The land where the sun sets and does not rise.