Into the Labyrinth by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman Read Free Book Online

blood; the dagger was dark with it. Lifting his hand above Samah’s heart, Xar spoke a word. The heart-rune flashed blue. Fast as lightning, the magic spread from the heart-sigil to the sigil touching it, from that sigil to the one touching it, and soon blue light was flickering and dancing all over the body.
    An eerie, glowing form wavered into being near the body, as if the dead man’s shadow were made of light instead of darkness. Xar drew in a shivering breath of awe. This pallid image was the phantasm—the ethereal, immortal part of every living being, what the mensch called the “soul.”
    The phantasm tried to pull away from the body, tried to free itself, but it was caught in the husk of chill and bloody flesh and could only writhe in an agony comparableto that experienced by the body when it had lived in torment.
    Suddenly the phantasm disappeared. Xar frowned, but then saw the dead eyes pathetically lit from within: a mockery of life, the spirit joining momentarily with the body.
    “I have done it!” Xar cried in exaltation. “I have done it! I have brought life back to the dead!”
    But now what to do with it? The lord had never seen one of the dead raised; he had only heard descriptions from Haplo. Appalled and sickened by what he had seen, Haplo had kept his descriptions brief.
    Samah’s dead body sat bolt upright. He had become a lazar.
    Startled, Xar fell back a step. He caused the runes on his skin to glow bright red and blue. The lazar are powerful beings who come back to life with a terrible hatred of all things living. A lazar has the strength of one who is past feeling pain and fatigue.
    Naked, his body covered with bloody tracings of Patryn sigla, Samah stared around in confusion, the dead eyes occasionally flickering with pitiable life when the phantasm flitted inside.
    Shaken by his triumph, overawed, the lord needed time to think, to calm himself. “Lazar, say something to it.” Xar motioned, his hands trembling with excitement. “Speak to it.” He drew back against a far wall to watch and to exult in his achievement.
    The lazar, a man, obediently stepped forward. Before death—which had obviously come by violence, to judge by the cruel marks still visible on the corpse’s throat—the man had been young and comely. Xar paid scant attention to the lazar beyond a brief glance to assure himself that it wasn’t Kleitus.
    “You are one of my people,” said the lazar to Samah. “You are Sartan.”
    “I am … I was,” said the voice of the corpse.
    “I am … I was,” came the dismal echo from the trapped phantasm.
    “Why did you come to Abarrach?”
    “To learn necromancy.”
    “You traveled here to Abarrach,” repeated the lazar,its voice a lifeless monotone, “to learn the art of necromancy. To use the dead as slaves to the living.”
    “I did … I did.”
    “And you know now the hatred the dead bear for the living, who keep them in bondage. For you see, do you not? You see … freedom …”
    The phantasm coiled and wrenched in a futile attempt to escape. The hatred on the face of the corpse as it turned its sightless—yet all too clear-seeing—eyes to Xar caused even the Patryn to blanch.
    “You, lazar,” the Lord of the Nexus interrupted harshly, “what are you called?”
    “Jonathon.”
    “Jonathon, then.” The name meant something to Xar, but he couldn’t think what. “Enough talk of hatred. You lazar are free now, free from the weaknesses of the flesh that you knew when you were alive. And you are immortal. It is a great gift we living have given you …”
    “One we would be happy to share,” said the lazar of Samah in a low, dire voice.
    “… to share,” came the fearful echo.
    Xar was displeased; the rune-glow that came from his body flared. “You waste my time. There are many questions I will ask you, Samah. Many questions you will answer for me. But the first, the most important, is the one I asked you before you died. Where is the