TRIAD

Karigan was stretched out on a cold, hard surface. Her eyes fluttered open to white. Gauzy white. Linen tickled her nose and eyelashes. “Gods!” She tore off the shroud and sat up panting. The sight that met her eyes was not much more reassuring.

She was surrounded by a milky white landscape and sky—if they could be called such. White plains stretched infinitely in all directions. The sky possessed no sun, clouds, or moon, it was simply white. There was no differentiation, no horizon, no undulating terrain, no defining lines. Nothing broke or blemished the all-pervasive white.

Even the green of her uniform was washed out as if this strange place could not endure color. Her skin had gone pale.

Worse still, suspended above her by no means she could detect, was a portrait of herself like a mirror image, only like a sleeper with her eyes shut and hands folded across her chest. A death portrait.

“Gods!”

Karigan rolled off the stone slab. It looked exactly like the ones she had seen along Heroes Avenue inscribed with funerary symbols, and tablets adhered to the base depicting scenes from the deceased’s life. The tablets on this slab showed images of her journey. She fought the creature of Kanmorhan Vane on one tablet, on another she faced off with Torne, and in a third she rode Condor at full gallop.

She put her hand to her temple. “Is this death?” Her voice sounded small and muffled.

A moving, billowing vapor rolled and tumbled across the plain. In no time it converged upon her and wisped about her, obscuring the white world with yet another layer of cottony white. It enveloped and pressed in on her. She turned round and round, looking for a clearing or point of reference, but the vapor was all pervasive. Attempts to wave it away simply caused it to swirl and eddy in dizzying patterns. She paused, breathless. The vapor moved by her in ragged shreds, and as quickly as it came, it drifted away and unveiled two rows of funeral slabs, each laden with an occupant.

Not again, she thought with foreboding.

She passed between the slabs slowly. The shrouds draped the corpses in such a way that she could clearly discern the outlines of their features: Fastion, Mel, King Zachary, Sevano, Captain Mapstone, her father . . .

With a cry she clawed the shroud off her father. It rustled to the ground beside her. She shook him and patted his cheeks, but his flesh was cold, his body stiff.

“No!”

Light, musical laughter rippled around her. “Dead,” a voice said. The Eletian.

Karigan looked in all directions, but no one was there. “If this is death,” she shouted, “where are all the other spirits?”

“Dead.” His voice tolled like a sonorous bell.

On the verge of weeping, Karigan went to Captain Mapstone’s slab. She peeled back the shroud. Here the captain looked far more peaceful in death than she ever had in life. She was dressed in her full formal uniform with its gold captain’s cords on the shoulders, and silken sash tied around her waist. She clasped the hilt of her saber in her hands. Her winged horse brooch gleamed coldly in the white light of the world.

Karigan’s own brooch resonated, and without knowing how she knew to do so, she touched the captain’s brooch. “I am not dead,” she said.

A voice in her head responded, True.

“I am dead.”

False.

“Dead!” the Eletian cried.

False.

“You must not disturb the dead.”

Karigan snatched her hand away from the captain’s brooch and turned, heart thumping, to find Agemon of the tombs observing her. He carried a cloth in his hands and bent over Captain Mapstone to polish her saber.

“Where are we?” she asked him, relieved to see another living being, even if it was Agemon.

Agemon hummed tunelessly as he polished.

“Agemon!”

The little man faltered and gazed at her with a perplexed expression. “Huh?”

“Where are we?”

He peered at her through his specs. “It is a transitional place.”

Karigan licked her lips. Her mouth was dry and the vapor had left an acrid taste in it. “Why are we here?” She gestured at the corpses.

“They are,” he said, “what could be.”

Not dead yet, she thought, but could be.

“Agemon,” she said, “you must show me the way back.”

“I cannot.”

“Why?” Desperation crept back into her voice. “I need to go back. I need to help the others, the king—”

He looked her up and down and clucked. “I attend the dead. You are touched by the dead, but not dead. Not yet.”

“Agemon!” She clutched his sleeve. “Please! Show me the way out.”

He simply stared at her with his frightened hare expression until she let him go. He readjusted his robes and waggled the specs on the end of his nose.

“You cannot leave once you enter,” he said.

False, the voice vibrated in her mind.

“Do not forget the sword,” he said, “or she will be unhappy.”

He pointed into the distance. Thunderous hooves clamored in her ears after so much silence. Far off, a horse and rider galloped across the plain in silhouette. In moments they disappeared. Karigan glanced down at Captain Mapstone. The saber clenched in her hands was no longer her own, but that of the First Rider. Karigan pried it from her stiff fingers.

At the sound of humming, Karigan pivoted just in time to see Agemon scuttling away, his legs working beneath his long robes.

“Agemon! Wait!” She darted after him, but no matter how fast she ran, she could not gain on him. He grew smaller and smaller as the gulf between them expanded, his aimless humming fading until he disappeared altogether.