The dwarf left Ambrose to await Inza's arrival. As he headed for the door and the chill afternoon beyond, he snatched a fistful of salted meat strips from ajar on the counter. The stuff was wretchedly tough, with a taste like mummified dog flesh. Azrael loved it.

Humming through a mouthful of the unappealing stuff, he surveyed the locus of suffering that was the Veidrava Salt Mine. Down the road from Ambrose's store squatted the miners' hovels. The buildings huddled together on the broken hillside. They were situated far from the tree line, ostensibly to make them easier to defend. The miners knew, however, that the isolation simply made the buildings easier to police. Even now, the armed and armored riders circled the shanty town like wolves around a stranded flock. The soldiers' eyes, and their crossbows, were turned toward the buildings, not the forest.

The steady thud of the rock crusher and the other, more erratic sounds from the mine itself drowned out any noise coming from the squalid camp. Azrael couldn't hear the screaming infants or the drunken brawls, but he could smell them. He breathed in the stench of piss and blood and despair as someone else might enjoy a wine's bouquet. He held the foulness in his lungs and savored it as he did everything about the mine.

There was something about Azrael that thrived at Veidrava. It was more than a vague inclination for the place, more than some mental sympathy. A spiritual sort might have attributed the feeling to a resonance of the locale with his soul. But Azrael knew with certainty-and more than a little relief-that he lacked any sort of spiritual essence.

Still, Azrael could almost feel something inside him writhing blissfully with each bleak sunset, fattening itself on the strife and misery and chaos that preyed upon the land and, in particular, his mine. It was the dark, he supposed, some little piece of it he carried with him. Usually, though, any such metaphysical musings were swept away by the awful rapture Azrael leeched from the suffering around him.

In search of just such agony, Azrael turned his back on the workers' homes and headed up the hillside to the mine. The lowering sun made the place look unearthly, full of twisted shadows. Towers and buildings reared up from the broken earth. Ropes hung between their roofs, while wooden sluices crawled between them closer to the ground. A thick saline dust covered everything-the towers, the tin-roofed warehouse, even the watchmen making their slow circuit of the grounds.

Azrael nodded a greeting to one of the pit bosses as he headed for the building closest to the main shaft. It was a hulking block with walls constructed of seamless, windowless slabs of wood. The miners called the building the Engine House. No one but Azrael and his most trusted pit bosses ever went inside. The workers who had built the place in only three days lay in a mass grave not far away. Most of the miners assumed it sheltered some wondrous mechanical works that powered the elevator and the water screw and the rock grinder. The assumption was both correct and mistaken.

The Engine House did indeed contain the mine's primary source of power, but that source was not mechanical. Machines do not weep.

The din of clanking chains and thundering hammers usually masked that sound to anyone passing the Engine House. But Azrael could hear it clearly enough after he clambered through the short earthen tunnel that served as the Engine House's only entrance. There, in the foul and cacophonous half-light, sat a giant. He'd sat in that spot for five years, since the Engine House was first constructed around him. Iron bars pinned his legs to the ground at angles that were painful even to see. Even without the restraints, those filth-caked limbs were clearly useless to him.

"Nabon! Stop blubbering," the dwarf shouted. "You'll rust up the works."

The giant continued to sob, even as he cranked a massive wheel with one hand and reeled in a chain with the other. Thinking the brute might not have heard him, Azrael grabbed a whip that hung conveniently by the tunnel. It took three lashes to draw Nabon's attention and two more to get him to cease his work.

"But the lift," the giant began. Nabon glanced at a pillar marked with various cryptic symbols; a rusty arrow waved between two of those marks. "They're stuck between tunnels."

"Don't talk back," growled Azrael. He snapped the whip as close to the goliath's face as it would reach, which was the center of his chest. "You do what I tell you, when I tell you."

"Yes, great Sorrow."

The dwarf grinned at the honorific. It was one Nabon himself had coined for Azrael-the Sorrow of Sithicus. The dwarf had liked it so much that he'd ordered his pit bosses to use it. The title had since spread to the elves, and even the Vistani. Only the humans seemed reluctant to use it; they couldn't understand how someone would consider the label an honorific at all.

"I'm going down to the chapel," the dwarf announced.

Nabon stopped reeling in the chain. Somewhere close by, a massive hammer silenced.

"What are you doing?" Azrael shrieked. "Keep the crusher going. Let go of the lift."

Nabon hesitated. Azrael waited three heartbeats, then tossed his whip aside. From the shadows he retrieved a huge maul. The mallet's head was studded with metal, its wood blotched with gore. He wielded the thing exclusively against the giant's legs, though the blows did more to crush his soul than his already mangled limbs.

Once, Nabon had been a wayfarer, a traveler with no particular destination. The journey's pleasure had been his only desire, and he indulged that pleasure for weeks and months and years on end. He kept to the secret trails and hidden paths that wound through all the dark domains, ways so desolate that even a giant could walk them unseen. He harmed no one. He asked for nothing but the freedom to travel.

Azrael wished that he could take credit for capturing the brute, but that distinction belonged to another. The dwarf had to be content with reaping the benefits of that treacherous act. He had also discovered that the quickest way to break the giant's spirit was to break his legs. Nabon hoped to take to the road again someday. That hope, more than any chain or threat of violence, bent his kind heart to Azrael's twisted whims, for the dwarf promised to heal those shattered legs, but only if Nabon followed his commands.

Advancing upon the giant, Azrael raised the maul. "I'll mash your shins to paste, Nabon. Let the lift fall."

The giant closed his eyes, as if that might somehow mute the horror of what he was about to do. It didn't. He opened his hand and let the wheel spin, faster and faster, until it stopped with a sickening abruptness. The lift had struck the bottom of the shaft. Anyone inside was surely dead.

When Nabon finally opened his eyes once more the tears were gone. Those blue orbs might have been stone for all the life they displayed. Mechanically he hauled the crusher chain with one callused hand. He held out the other, palm up, and said flatly. "What would you have me do now, my Sorrow?"

"Much better," the dwarf said. "You can stop the crusher. I'm going down to the chapel."

He waited for Nabon to ready the special lift, a gate-fronted black box that only Azrael used. The dwarf stepped inside, slid the wrought-iron gate closed, and took a seat on the padded bench. Nabon slid back the trap door that opened to the main shaft. Sound welled up from the pit like water from a tainted spring. Cries and clatter from the resting place of the ruined lift mingled with the more mundane clamor-the thud of countless picks and hammers, the braying of mules, the shouts and curses of the miners as they went about their backbreaking labor.

Azrael luxuriated in the noise and the darkness as the lift began its descent. He had no fear that Nabon would drop him. The possibility was as remote to him as the miners rising up in revolt or Ambrose turning against him. They feared him too much for that. More importantly, he left them enough hope to stave off total despair. They'd be dangerous if they thought they had nothing left to lose, but he had no intention of letting them realize that.