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

body—an ashen and blood-covered shell—laid slowly down on the stone bed. It shuddered, then was still. The eyes grew dark and now truly lifeless.
    Jonathon reached out his hand, closed them.
    Xar, suspecting some trick, stared hard into Zifnab’s cell. Nothing. No sight of the wet and bedraggled old Sartan.
    “Hand me that torch!” Xar commanded, peering about in baffled outrage.
    The Lord of the Nexus banished the cell bars with an impatient wave of his hand and strode into the cell, flashing the light into every part of it.
    “What do you think you will find, Lord?” Sang-drax snarled. “That he is playing at peekaboo in a corner? I tell you, he is gone!”
    Xar didn’t like the dragon-snake’s tone. The lordturned, held the light so that it would flare into the dragon’s one good eye. “If he has escaped, it is your fault! You were supposed to be guarding him! Sea water of Chelestra!” Xar sneered. “Takes away their power! Obviously it didn’t!”
    “It did, I tell you,” Sang-drax muttered.
    “But he can’t get far,” Xar reflected. “We have guards posted at the entrance to Death’s Gate. He—”
    The dragon-snake hissed suddenly—a hiss of fury that seemed to wrap its coils around Xar and squeeze the breath from his body. Sang-drax pointed a rune-covered hand at the stone bed. “There! There!” He could say no more; the breath gurgled in his throat.
    Xar held the torchlight to shine on the spot. The lord’s eyes caught a glint, a sparkle that came from something on the stone. He reached down, picked it up, held it to the light.
    “It’s nothing but a scale—”
    “A dragon’s scale!” Sang-drax glared at it with enmity, made no move to touch it.
    “Perhaps.” Xar was noncommittal. “A lot of reptiles have scales, not all of them dragons. And what of it? It has nothing to do with the old man’s disappearance. It must have been here for ages—”
    “Undoubtedly you are right, Lord of the Nexus.” Sang-drax was suddenly nonchalant, though his one good eye remained fixed on the scale. “What could a dragon—one of my cousins, for instance—possibly have to do with that daft old man? I will go and alert the guard.”
    “I give the orders—” Xar began, but his words were wasted.
    Sang-drax had vanished.
    The lord stared around at the empty cell, fuming, a disturbing and unfamiliar unease jabbing deep beneath his skin.
    “What is going on?” he was forced to ask himself, and the simple fact that he had to ask that question indicated to the Lord of the Nexus that he had lost control.
    Xar had known fear many times in his life. He knew fear every time he walked into the Labyrinth. But still he was able to walk in; he was able to grapple with his fear and put it to use, channel its energy into self-preservation, because he knew that he was in control. He might notknow which enemy the Labyrinth was going to hurl at him, but he knew every enemy that existed, knew their strengths and their weaknesses.
    But now. What was going on? How had that feeble-minded old man escaped? Most important, what did Sang-drax fear? What did the dragon-snake know that he wasn’t telling?
    “Haplo didn’t trust them,” the lord said to himself, glaring at the scale he held in his hand. “He warned me not to trust them. So did that fool who lies dead over there. Not”—Xar scowled—“that I believe any claim of either Haplo’s or Samah’s. But I am beginning to believe that these dragon-snakes have their own goals, which may or may not coincide with mine.
    “Yes, Haplo warned me against them. But what if he did so only to blind me to the fact that he is in league with them? They called him ‘Master’ once. 1 He admitted as much to me. And Kleitus talks to them. Perhaps they are all in league against me.”
    Xar stared around the cell. The torchlight was failing; the shadows grew darker, began to close in around him. It was nothing to him whether or not he had light. The sigla on his body