How he can see me, I wish to know.

The Thrasson's mouth starts to work, and he lifts himself on his foot and three hands and scrambles away backward. "The-the-the Lady!"

The tanar'ri and the bariaur scowl at his terror and look straight through me and show no sign of fear, and so I know they cannot see me.

"She's only in your mind." The bariaur pushes past Karfhud and goes to shake the Thrasson. "Stop imagining her – before we see her too!"

The tanar'ri pulls the old cleric back. The fiend cannot see me directly, but he knows what is in the Thrasson's mind, and so he supposes me to be some new trick of Sheba's.

We know better, do we not? Someone warned the Thrasson I would be waiting, just as someone also showed him how to see the Pains. For this second betrayal, I should kill him on the instant. The matter would be simple now, with his god-forged armor lying crumpled and useless back in the mazes, with him groveling on the ground before me like any common bloodblade vain enough to think I care – and what punishment more fitting than to rob you of your hero so close to victory or defeat? To never know whether he could have slain the monster, saved Tessali, won back his memories, and – doubtful though it seems – learned the meaning of his maze? That punishment you deserve, for betraying my trust, and for so much, much more.

I push a fingernail toward his torso, and a hole the size of an arrow shaft appears in his chest; dark blood spurts out in a great, throbbing arc, spattering the walls and imparting a faint, coppery tinge to the passage's fetor. The Thrasson does not scream or thrash about in agony; all his golden husks have long since ruptured, and only the black ones remain. I have been expecting them to burst for some time now, but in that, too, I have been disappointed. He only gasps in astonishment and stanches the flow by sticking a finger into the wound.

The insolence! No mere man of renown may refute my will. I drag a finger up through the air; a red seam opens along one side of his throat, pouring a curtain of blood down over his chest.

The astonished tanar'ri grabs him under the arms, thinking to pass him back to the bariaur for healing. I step forward, lifting first one foot, then the other off the ground, and I show myself to the Thrasson's would-be rescuers.

Karfhud allows a groan to slip his cracked lips. We have met once before, longer ago than. I can count, when the Blood War spilled into Sigil and made the Slags, and I am the one thing in the multiverse he dreads more than he hates. He drops the Thrasson and sprints from the passage without looking back. What happened to the bariaur, I cannot say. He is gone even before the fiend.

The Thrasson is quick to his feet and turns to follow, but him I must show no mercy. I blink, and when he takes his first step after the fiend, it is into my arms he runs.

Angry as I am at your betrayal, I do not kill him. I have seen that the Thrasson is a man fated to cany the Pains, and it is not my place to rob destiny, only to punish you. I hug him close to my breast, as a mother would a child. He thinks to raise his star-forged sword, but he is too late; no mortal alive has the strength to free himself from my embrace. I hold him until I feel the Pains rising from that void in my chest; until my flesh tingles and flushes and shudders with delight; until my ecstasy fills me to glutting, sates me with honeyed rapture and bliss rolls into sweet agony; until my body nettles with scalding anguish; until I boil in my own sick regret, and still I hold him. The well pours forth, fills me with anguish as fire fills a forge, and still I hold him. I have but one chance, and now all Sigil's hope lies with the Amnesian Hero.

Yet, do not think I have forgiven your betrayal. You have made yourself a part of this, and so I give you the same privilege that I gave Karfhud: go and wander the mazes alone, never look upon the Thrasson again, leave him bleeding and friendless in my tender arms, the Pains rooting deep down in his soul-or remain loyal; continue along with him and suffer the same as all who call Theseus their friend. The choice belongs to you, and that is vengeance enough for me. Reprisal

Who can say how long the Thrasson has been cringing there in the fetid damp murk, his knees and his elbows and his face all cold upon the floor? Long enough for the stink of fear to fill the tunnel, long enough for the welts to become blisters, long enough for the blisters to swell into pods and the pods to start their throbbing, long enough for the husks to stretch out their black waving spines and curl their tips into barbed, man-catching hooks.

Check yourself. You know what to look for: a welt, a blister, a rising boil or red pimple, an abscess, a sore you wish you did not have. You're part of it now, one of the damned and the damning, one of the wayfarers who brings a little something extra back from his trip, one of Sigil's bright-shining angels of pain. You will ask yourself, when you happen on some glassy-eyed derelict wandering mad in the streets or hear an injured friend wailing in agony, if it was you who passed him the pod; you will suffer a little with each poor wretch; you will be quietly grateful the husk was not on you when it burst.

Blame me if you will, but these Pains you have earned. I hope you will bear your few better than the Thrasson his thousand.

Still he cringes there on the floor, a blob of spiny pulsing pods, looking more like the egg sack of a bebilith than a man. How long has it been? More than minutes, maybe more than hours, perhaps even days. He may mean to starve himself, though I doubt even he can say: never has a whirlpool spun so fast as the one in his mind is spinning now.

Because he keeps his head cold to the floor, he does not see the dark hand reaching into the tunnel. He does not behold the black ribbon slipping from between its' fingers to flutter down the passage toward him, nor does he notice the scrap circling his body, passing through the mass of clinging pods like a spear through fog. He only remembers himself, hunched and weeping, staring out his palace window toward the distant seashore. There lies his son Hippolytus, crashed beneath the wheels of a chariot when a sea monster rose and frightened the horses.

"Your son's death is my doing. King." The servant's broken voice comes from behind Theseus's back. "Had I told you how angry Phaedra became when your son rebuked her advances, you would never have called Poseidon's curse down upon him."

In his hands, Theseus holds a message, found beneath his wife Phaedra's swinging feet, accusing her stepson Hippolytus of defiling her womanly honor. The Thrasson crumples the scroll, and he feels something shrivel inside.

"No!"

At last, Theseus has lifted his head off the tunnel's cold floor. The first black pod has burst, covering his chest with a glistening cascade of ebony ichor. "I cannot bear it!"

"My gift does not please you?" Karfhud stepped into the tunnel. He was furling a new mapping parchment, and there was dark blood dripping from his index talon. "Then I apologize. I thought you wanted to recover your memories."

Theseus rose and cast a wary eye at the parchment. It looked too damp and pink to have been forgotten someplace in Karfhud's satchel. The Thrasson waved at the thing with his sword's glowing tip.

"Where did you get that?"

"I doubt you really want to know," Karfhud said. "But have no fear. I did not kill either of your friends for it."

"Where else would it come from?" the Thrasson demanded. Perhaps Karfhud had not seen Sheba at all. "Is that what you were thinking of when you let Tessali drown?"

Karfhud shook his head. "Tessali is not drowned – and your friends are not the only prey in the mazes."

"But they are the only prey likely to be down here." Theseus sniffed at the rotten air, then added, "At least the only prey whose skin might still be usable."