Page 109 of Silver & Gold

Because it was the same face worn by two men. Two brothers who had shared a womb, who had been formed of the same flesh but not the same spirit.

Or maybe they had been?

Hassan, too, had been arrogant. Hassan, too, had grasped at what he wanted. Raider recalled it fully now, seeing that face. How he’d tried to evade Hassan’s interest. How little choice he’d had. How Hassan had ruled him, even if softly.

But Hassan had not hurt Raider as Kazir had done. Would he have, if Raider had resisted him?

A minute of difference in their births and it would have been Kahzir who had ruled the Gold. A minute of difference and perhaps Hassan would have broken Raider instead of his brother.

Regardless, it would always have been that face shaping his nightmares. That voice crawling through his mind.

All these thoughts in a moment. A heartbeat.

So much could happen in a heartbeat.

As the past seized Raider, so too did the present. And the present was Seth.

Seth yanked Raider back. Away from the catacomb entrance. Away from Kahzir. Away from the thing that came slinking out around him.

Raider hit the floor as Seth yanked his sword from its scabbard and swung. He cut straight through the neck of the humanoid creature. It looked like a roughly shaped clay figure, neither male nor female, something animate but without real life.

A homunculus.

When Seth’s sword hacked through its neck, the clay head tumbled. It hit the floor. The homunculus stepped on its own head, which stuck to its foot like a lumpy growth. Then the clay body rippled as the homunculus absorbed its own matter, and a head grew at the stump of its neck.

Again, all this in a heartbeat.

And next, in a heartbeat, the homunculus hit Seth in the chest so hard that he was sent flying backwards down the hallway.

Raider lunged for the homunculus, but it leaped clear over him, landing with a puff of clay dust. Raider scrambled up.

Two instincts tore at him. One said, Do not turn your back on Kahzir. But the other said simply, Seth!

So of course he turned his back on Kahzir. Of course he took that first desperate step in Seth’s direction. He even managed to summon the quicksilver, to send it shooting forward, spear-like, to impale the homunculus as it grabbed Seth by the front of his vest.

It was enough to buy Seth a second, to let him wrench free of the clay grip.

It was also enough to let Kahzir get behind him.

Raider jerked at the sharp prick in his neck and the familiar burn in his veins. Maybe, even then, if he had turned instantly on Kahzir with his quicksilver, he might have avoided his fate.

But he would never have chosen that. Instead, he used that last second of his strength to yank the clay creature away from Seth and slam it into the wall with the quicksilver spear—before the world faded.

***

Raider had been here before, more than once, in the murky void between life and death. More than once, he had haunted this space and seen others, wraithlike, passing through.

Always, he had a vague memory of his last moment before coming here.

The scalpel.

The Box.

Kahzir’s face—or Hassan’s?

This time, his last memory was the catacombs. The rough stone walls riddled with black-as-night alcoves where the ancient dead lay crumbling. The twists and turns. The creeping chill. And the fight with Kahzir as he’d clawed his desperate way back to semi-consciousness.

He’d had a weird, doubled feeling of being both inside and outside his body as he’d grabbed the syringe from his sash, flipped its cap, and jabbed it into his vein, shooting Julian’s drug into his bloodstream. He’d wrestled weakly with Kahzir after that. He remembered hitting the ground. He remembered another stinging prick. Then he’d found himself here in the nothingness between life and death. Where he’d been before.