TARGOTH'S STRIATED RUINS sprawled over several hills. Ulrem’s path took him towards a heavily damaged section, where it seemed as if giants had crashed through in a mad stampede. Skeletal remains of stubborn walls traced what had been a grand square, but most of these had collapsed, leaving only the faintest sketch of life.

Ulrem clambered up one pile of sun-blasted bricks that still radiated hot enough to sting his palms. Another scream. Ulrem changed course, continuing up the pile and onto a neighboring roof. From there, he picked his way along tenuously like a thief, each step weighing mightily in his mind as he tracked the source of the commotion.

Below, five streets met in a disjointed star, where a space large enough to hold a market lay strewn with the slouched old bones of buildings that had fallen in. He spied Tolin and Jakt engaged in some sort of deadly contest. A knife was suspended between them, its point directed at Jakt’s face, with Tolin forcing it slowly, inevitably down on his friend. The blond man was bleeding from a bad gash on his arm. He had sunken to one knee as he tried to fend the other off.

Ulrem pounced from one heap to another, climbing with all fours like a panther coming down a cliff with impossible speed. The men did not see him coming, so lost were they in their struggle.

He plucked up a palm-sized stone from the ground and let fly. It hit Tolin in the side of the head, and the bones went out of him in an instant. With a gurgle, he collapsed to the side, dropping the knife.

Jakt fell forward, heaving with relief.

“What the black hells is going on?” Ulrem demanded, sliding to a halt. “Why did you go off on your own like that?”

“What?” Jakt sat up, and looked around, blinking and shaking his head. “Where are the invaders?”

Ulrem cast a wary eye around. This street was as empty as the rest had seemed. But something was at work here. Something he could not see. Sorcery. Ulrem had no more trust for sorcery than he did snakes, and stayed away from both whenever he could. Had he wandered into a viper’s nest? He dragged Jakt to his feet, giving the man a cruel shake as he did so.

“Wake up! There are no invaders. Why was Tolin trying to drive that knife into your eye?”

Startled by the big man’s sudden violence, Jakt seemed to come back to himself. Horror replaced the dreaminess in his eyes.

“Tolin!” he cried, pulling free of Ulrem’s fist and going to check on his comrade. “He’s dead!”

“And you aren’t,” Ulrem said pointedly. “Be glad I arrived when I did.”

Jakt threw himself down in despair. Bright crimson blood ran freely down his arm where Tolin had sliced him, but he did not seem to notice the wound. He was deathly pale and sweating heavily. “It must have been a vision? We were… there was a dance. A festival. They said… They said it was the new year. There were women, and wine, and… and then savages with spears and swords coming out of the dark. Wild men wearing devil masks! The people at the dance… they couldn’t defend themselves.”

“And Tolin?”

“I don’t know. I lost sight of him in the fighting. The blood was pooling in the street! Oh, Iddunir’s waters… They tried to flee, but the savages were all around us. I still had my knife… tried to defend myself. But one of them cut me, here on my arm. Ulrem, I can’t fight anymore,” Jakt said, shaking his head. “I’m sick of it. What’s the point?”

“Surrender is death, man. Now, tie that wound off. We need to move. If we sit here, whatever that was will find us again.”

Jakt stared at him miserably. “What about poor Tolin? We can’t leave him here. Not like this.”

But Ulrem was already moving. The soft crunch of his sandals over gravel seemed to ring loud in the vacant streets.

“You’re a right hard bastard, aren’t you?” Jakt panted as he caught up. He had left the corpse behind, after all.

“I don’t grieve for the men I kill. Leave that for the wives and mothers.”

Jakt chose to ignore that. “Tolin was my friend. A good, true man. Marched with him for three years.”

“And what did that buy you?” Ulrem muttered. “Better to fend for yourself.”

“If you like being alone so much, why did you join the Company?”

Ulrem glared up at the sky. Overhead, the moon was rising over cooling Targoth. The air had taken a cold edge, but Ulrem had a feeling that the chill was the least of their concerns. His thumb played idly with the gold band on his finger, feeling the strange, persistent warmth. Eventually, he rolled his heavy shoulders.

“I wanted to fight.” A half-truth, of course. Ulrem had sought out discipline after stumbling from the ruins of Irom na-Thar. Master yourself, master the ring. The words echoed like a prophecy within him. He had not known how to master himself. Living by fang and claw, Ulrem had come out of the west ferocious, powerful, but feral. He had no people now, nothing to temper the violence that had forged him. With the last of the western kings dead, he had been directionless. A beast miring in the mud. He saw it now, with the advantage of distance.

Jakt rubbed his jaw, kneading up his own story. “I enlisted because I needed the coin,” he said soberly. “My father was a gambler, and a piss poor one. Well, the satrap’s men came knocking, and he hired me out for a year to the Company. I was just sixteen. After that...I stayed. Tolin and I… Well, we had adventures, you could say. The marching life ain’t so bad when you know who's arm has the shield beside you, you know?”

Ulrem grunted, clambering over a great column that lay collapsed across the road. Jakt followed, breathing as quietly as a dog.

“Where are we going?”

“The palace.”

“Why?”

Ulrem couldn’t say. He had a feeling that something was there, waking, rising from ancient dreams. Whatever life still echoed in Targoth had a center, and it pulled Ulrem towards it like a nail towards a lodestone.

They could not mistake the palace. It was obvious from the roofs they sometimes crossed, set on a bluff above the rest of Targoth. The dark edifice was a sprawling silhouette surrounded by arches and columns, with eight tall minarets. Three of these were mere stumps now, jagged gray fangs jutting up out of the rest of the rubble, their splendor long gone. Along the spine of the palace were three great domes shaped like onions. A broad public stair was cut into the shoulder of the ridge, providing a way up to the ancient seat of the Targothi throne from the city below.

They had nearly closed the distance when a troop of men in buckled bronze breastplates and studded skirts, bearing square shields, burst around a corner ahead of them. The guardsmen’s faces lit up with surprise and they raised their shields with a shout.

Instincts long sharpened on the whetstone of the wild spaces of the world served Ulrem once again. He felt the rumbling of shod feet behind them even before he heard the invaders rounding another corner. Where another man might have hesitated, head twisted in the dream, Ulrem simply acted.

“Get down!” he cried, shoving Jakt to the ground and diving aside. A barrage of deadly spears shot overhead. Had he acted a moment later, they would have struck him down.

Rolling with a roar, Ulrem caught his first sight of the invaders. Ragged, mustached invaders in crude leather armor and garish wooden masks barreled down the streets. They raised cudgel and sword, whooping like demons. Three dozen or more, blood-mad and eager for a fight. From the windows, civilians flung stones, pottery, and shit down on the attackers. They charged through it nonetheless, and the noise of their impact into the defenders rang harshly off the walls.

This vision of carnage was lit by lurid balls of raging light that arced high with quiet grace, and then crashed down amongst the buildings, setting wildfires blazing. Already the screams were going up as the first salvo of sorcerous fire struck only a few streets away.

There was panic all around now, and fire whistles, and the stink of human fear hung like a drug cloud over the whole of Targoth. The defenders wilted under foreign clubs and thew, giving way step by step.

“We have to help them!”

“Not our fight!” Ulrem snarled, dragging Jakt back into a narrow alley. He led the blond man along the serpentine corridor, the sky little more than a stream of stars above their heads.

A trio of barbarians burst through a door ahead. Between them they had a woman. Greedy claws tore at her gown. She screamed, but one of them muffled her with a cruel paw until all Ulrem could hear was their eager, evil laughter.

Ulrem drew his sword in one smooth motion and planted it in the closest dog’s back. A savage kick drove the dead man off his sword and into his comrades. The others dropped their prey and drew knives, falling into fighter’s crouches, cursing him and swearing vengeance, the woman forgotten.

“Begone devils, or I will send you all back to hell this night!” Ulrem snarled. The woman scrambled under his legs and away, back through the shattered remains of her door.

Laughing, the thugs came at him at once, high and low, closing like a vicious trap. Ulrem swept out of their reach and then drove back in, feeling the dance of death within him. The left man caught his probing thrust in a clumsy parry, but Ulrem carried the motion, hacking on the return at the man’s shoulders. H fell away, screaming.

Ulrem had their measure, then. They were rangy, weak men: hyenas that knew only to nip at weak spots. Ulrem was a lion, born to strength. Though the other man tried to stop him, Ulrem was the mightier. He drove his blade down brutally into the man’s the exposed flesh, burying it in the meat of the cur’s neck.

Shrieking now, the survivor cut at Ulrem’s arm. Ulrem hissed and drew back, feeling the white-hot pain of the wound. The man saw the blood streak from the cut and went wild, eyes showing the whites. He flew forward, sensing victory. Ulrem knew that madness, the kind that whispered of glory, but was thin as the wind. Ulrem stepped into the man’s overhead strike, catching his wrist with one hand, and drove his blade up under the man’s chin with the other, until it broke through the crown of his skull.

“Not our fight,” Jakt breathed behind him, back pressed against a wall. His eyes were wide with fear, and his tunic was soaked with sweat. He was near to breaking, the panic boiling over.

Ulrem rounded on the smaller man, disgust drawing his lip back to bare his teeth. He delivered an open-handed slap, sending Jakt reeling backward with a frightened cry.

“Keep your wits about you! If they draw on us, cut them down! We must get to the center of the city. That is where we will find the source.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s how it always is with sorcery! Always worst at the center.” Ulrem turned his back on the blond man and wiped his blade off on one of the invaders’ jerkins. “And next time, draw your sword, or find your own way out of this nightmare.”

Jakt drew his blade. Holding it seemed to steady him.

Nodding grimly, Ulrem pushed on. He could feel the palace pulling at him. Ahead, there was more fighting. Knowing there was no other choice, he sped out into the street with a war song on his lips.

A hundred men waged death on one another here. The battle lines had broken and the melee was senseless and mad. Civilians were fleeing from burning buildings, women bearing children in their arms, men shielding their families as they ran screaming from the conflict.

At the center of the combat was a burning effigy shaped like a cow. Flames licked up the back of the beast, casting hellish light over the bloodshed. Shadows ran like demons everywhere, cavorting amongst the butchery. Above, Ulrem saw the palace on its hill: the foot of the stairs opened not far along the battle-torn street now. They need only cut a path forward.

“Wet your blade, Jakt. We have work to do!” Ulrem felt the fury building in him like a storm. His ring was as hot as a kiln now, emanating golden strength. The echoes of the ring pulsed in his veins, pounding like war drums. Dream or not, now was the time to strike. He waded into the fray, cutting invaders down with his greatsword. It was nearly double the length of their blades, and in this wide avenue, he became a whirlwind of death, the song on his lips as haunting as a wolf’s croon in the dead of winter.

Drive them before you! howled the echoes of his ring. We are fire unrepentant! We are the Conquering Flame!

A searing light tore overhead, plummeting down like a miniature sun from the heavens. The fighters tried to run, but packed in as they were, it was difficult to flee. The fireball slammed into a wall, gushing flame and smoking debris. The wall buckled, dumping heaps of crushing stone on the men below.

Ulrem ran with his hands above his head, slamming men out of his path. He caught sight of Jakt just ahead. The blond man had crossed the street and survived the battle, but he was staggering with one hand on the far wall, bleeding from a head wound. Behind them, the choking cloy of dust mingled with the nauseating smell of cooked hair and screaming, still-alive meat.

Another fireball arced down, casting baleful light on them, evaporating shadows. It hit the street just behind, bursting with unbridled wrath. Ulrem and Jakt were sent flying as the buildings around them broke under the force of the explosion. He pushed himself up, running, and hauled Jakt behind him. The younger man was little better than dead weight.

Ulrem’s back was blistered from the explosion. The pain faded into a sick chill that seeped beneath the injury and made it difficult to breathe. He shuddered, drawing on the strength of the ring, letting its light fill him. The stairs lay just ahead now, and escape was at hand.

Stand and fight! The echoes of his ring brayed. They were ever clamoring for a fight—but who was there to stand against when all the world was mad, and the sky rained hellfire? When men were torched alive senselessly, and ghosts walked in waking dreams?

“Let me go! You’ll break my neck, you beast!” Jakt screeched. Ulrem stopped running and realized that they were once again alone. The streets were silent, the battle gone in a violent exhalation. Targoth slumbered once more under a cool and calm night.

Ulrem dropped his companion and backed up, horrified. The sorcery had enraptured him, had seized him, body and mind. What shield could hold it back?

Furious, Ulrem raised his fists to the sky. “Come and fight me!” he roared. “Enough!” Jakt shook on the ground at his feet.

“Did you see it?”

“Fire…blood,” Jakt whispered, dragging a knuckle under his nose. “Demons in the streets. They broke Targoth in a single night.”

“Not demons. Traitors.”

The stars were vivid overhead, aloof in their solemn judgment of the mortals below. Ulrem felt their glare upon him. The lion paced within him, as caged as he felt by these cold, dead ruins.

“Up, Jakt. We make for the palace.”

“I think it is trying to keep us back,” Jakt said miserably.

“Then it must not want us there.” With a heavy sigh, Ulrem put a hand on the man’s shoulder. It quavered under his touch. He drew a knife from his belt and wrapped Jakt’s nerveless fingers around the hilt. The blond man had dropped his sword in the fighting, and it was gone now, swept away by the city’s strange currents.

“Death grins at us tonight,” Ulrem said.

With a suffering sigh, Jakt nodded. He allowed himself to be pulled back to his feet.

“And we grin back.”