The lift came to a smooth stop at a cross shaft. The landing was dark, strewn with debris. Neither proved any obstacle to the dwarf, who trod through the rubble as easily as someone else might cross an open field lit by the noon sun. The landing quickly narrowed to a tunnel even more choked with rotting beams and broken tools.

Niches had been carved into the walls every few yards. They were carefully wrought from the salt-thick walls, with sconces chiseled to resemble flowers and other sun-loving things that had no place so far below ground. The sconces held no candles. Darkness had claimed this tunnel since the last human miner passed this way almost a decade ago.

After a time, the tunnel opened into a broad hallway. Here the rubble of shattered wood and crumbled stone had been swept away. The walls and floor became smooth and level. The simple sconces were now elaborate statuary of hounds and harts and more exotic creatures, all hewn from salt. Carvings covered the entire ceiling-scudding clouds and high-flying hawks intended to lend the illusion of open sky. In torchlight, the effect was overwhelming; a quirk in the composition of the salt dome here made the rock glow blue.

Azrael scarcely glanced around him as he stomped down the hallway toward the arched portal at its far end. He hadn't yet found the time to renovate the statues and the ceiling. Too much of the place's original intent lingered; its identity as an island of beauty within the bleakness of Veidrava made the dwarf distinctly uncomfortable.

Not so with the chamber that lay beyond. Azrael felt at home there.

As the dwarf entered the room, braziers sparked to life. The feeble flames they contained were not his doing, but the remnant of some ancient magic that had long outlived its maker. Even the dim light cast by the magical fires was enough to make Azrael's eyes smart after so long in the lightless tunnel.

The vast, vaulted room had once been a chapel. An observant visitor might still recognize the detritus of its sanctified past. In the room's center stood a scarred and stained block that once served as an altar. Like everything else in the chapel, it had been carved from salt. Half-melted forms that had once been benches were arrayed everywhere in neat little rows; the rounded masses seemed like supplicants bent before the blighted sacrificial table. Repulsive human forms, the vestiges of statues, lined both walls. The once-beatific heroes of the faith were reduced to grotesqueries that even the most debased human god would banish from its temple.

The wavering light sent shadows slithering up the walls and shooting across the floor. The sinuous shapes appeared to follow Azrael, to trail him across the room in ways no earthly shadow could. They seemed detached somehow from the objects that had formed them.

"I don't have time for you now," the dwarf said. The silent chapel offered a response, a susurrus that someone unfamiliar with the cursed place might have mistaken for a cold breeze. Azrael, however, knew this place and its denizens quite well.

"Soon enough you'll all be free of here," he announced. "By year's end, you'll all have your own forms."

He exited the chapel through a rough-hewn tunnel opposite from where he'd entered. In his wake, the shadows danced obscenely across the forsaken altar and the deformed statues. Even after the magical fires dimmed and sputtered out, shapes darker than the chapel's lightless murk moved through the darkness and schemed in voices few sane men had ever heard.

Beyond the chapel, a narrow tunnel wound deeper and deeper into the earth. Something large had burrowed here, with claws that cut through salt and stone like garden soil. The work impressed even Azrael, and he was pleased to make use of the tunnel system and the network of chambers it connected.

The chambers made ideal storage for the seneschal's hoard. Boxes, chests, bags, even a few small coffins intended for child victims of the plague were lodged in the hollows, each crammed full of gold and silver. It had taken Azrael two decades to pilfer this loot from the peasants and skim it from the mine's profits. But he did not cast a loving eye over the gold as he strolled along the tunnel; the dwarf had long prided himself on a disinterest in precious metals atypical for his kind. No, he valued the currencies only for what they would buy-and these coins were earmarked for a purchase few could imagine.

Azrael knew the sight of all that money, more than enough for his purposes, should have made him happy. He knew, too, that the Vistani would soon be out of his way-the only one that mattered, anyway. He had made Ambrose squirm, Nabon suffer, and he was on his way to his favorite spot in all of Sithicus, a site that usually filled his heart with glee. All that wasn't enough to make him forget that Soth had risen from his throne.

"Damn him," the dwarf muttered. A scowl stole across his features as soon as he realized what he'd said. The grim expression quickly became a smile. "Heh. Too late."

A weird purple glow at the end of the tunnel let Azrael know that he had reached his final destination. The air grew thick with the smell of brine, more overpowering here than in the rest of the mine. A chill dampness suffused the air. It wrapped itself around the dwarf like wet cerements.

Azrael emerged from the tunnel on the shore of a vast underground lake. High overhead, stalactites glowed with a violet light. The radiance was born of a moss that clung to the rock. The sickly plant seemed to thrive nowhere else in the mine, making it useless as a light source. Azrael had found it brewed down to a serviceable poison, though, one that caused a hysteria in its victims that was quite amusing to watch.

The water was black and still, a dark sheet of glass stretching to the horizon. Azrael cupped a hand and dipped it into the lake. The water looked black even in his palm. It had a strange feel to it, too. The liquid was heavier and more solid than water should be. Still, he did not hesitate as he lowered his face and slurped up the awful stuff.

Each swallow made his teeth ache and his temples throb with pain. The water burned like molten tar as it coursed down his throat. That awful heat had barely filled his gut when he heard the first voices. He sat down before they overwhelmed him.

The fragments were unconnected, a swarm of words that filled Azrael's mind. Questions without answers, cries of joy, agonized screams, the keening of the banshees at Nedragaard Keep- from all across the domain these sounds came to him. He focused and began to filter out the dull stuff of everyday life. The dwarf didn't care about the drivel people spouted over the breakfast table or lovers' inane pillow talk. He wanted to hear fear-

"Quick, Tomas, hide! They've got swords!"

Or sorrow-

"I can't face another day like this."

Or, better still, words edged with madness-

"Dead, eh? No bother. We've still got a use for your corpse, my dear."

Azrael listened for a time, letting the grief and pain of Sithicus fill his mind. He'd stumbled across this place a decade ago, not long after the Great Rift opened on the surface. The tremors that accompanied that event collapsed the chapel's back wall and revealed the tunnel that led him here. He assumed that this Lake of Sounds, as he had come to call it, was somehow linked to the rift, that the gaping rent gathered up the cries and whispers and funneled them here.

The cacophony had threatened to overwhelm his mind that first day, but he mastered it. And from that chaos he had forged a clarity of mind that left him immune to the confusion plaguing the domain. He alone could remember his past with crystal clarity-and the pasts of anyone else he cared to remember, too. For when Soth and the rest of the land raised their voices in confession to close the domain's borders, Azrael could hear and recall later the sins they proclaimed.