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eh?"
    Thom nodded and he and the Temple Guard left.
    "Have you tried going through the grotto?" Conar asked, his voice quite, subdued.
    Brelan looked at him, his mouth open in shock. "By the gods, but I'd forgotten about that!"
    Conar shrugged as he sat on the bed. "Be careful. That's where Galen died and where I lost what life I had." He laid down and turned his back to them.
    Brelan looked at Shalu. "Keep an eye on this child, Taborn. Keep his ass out of mischief." He strode to the door, jerked it open, and fled before Shalu could answer.

Chapter 6
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Torture, nor exile, nor imprisonment had brought Conar McGregor to his knees. For a short time he had risen again and the things that had happened to him, the pain he had suffered, strengthened him into a man fully capable of crushing anyone foolish enough to defy him. The years of abuse had shaped his willpower. It had toned down his arrogance, but the hot streak of sick fury coursing through his veins made him incautious at times, and his friends worried about his recklessness.
    Yet danger held no concern for him. If anything, it seemed to excite the man he had become and he thrived on the rush of adrenaline that coursed through his body when danger confronted him.
    His vengeance against the Domination had begun in Necroman with the arrival of a group of men trained to war without thought, to assassinate without conscience, to murder with little regard to the outcome.
    In Necroman, the Shadow Warriors had arrived.
    Misha Kharchenko had been sent to the Labyrinth at the same time as Sentian Heil, and Grice and Chand Wynth. The Outer Kingdom warrior from the Tzar's palace at St. Steffensberg had been among those who had accompanied Conar to freedom aboard the Boreas Queen. When he brought five men he called "his cousins" to the training camp outside Jhakar that day he had not bothered to introduce them to the Darkwind.
    "They will guard your back, Milord, but no one will ever see them," the reticent man had told him. "Do not even look for them, for not even you will see them lurking behind you. They will be your Shadow."
    These men from the Outer Kingdom taught the Darkwind how to kill. They taught him not to brook resistance from his men, not to tolerate excuses, not to accept half-measures, not to allow compromises where commitment was concerned or to give no quarter to those who had been unwise to cross him.
    And he hadn't seen them, though he had felt their presence many times. They finished what he started, killed men he had left wounded, but he didn't care. Those killed were his enemies and he gloried in their deaths.
    During times when he met the challenge of the Temple Guards he found in various towns, he shone in his men's eyes. It was then when he killed with abandon, leaving nothing behind for his Shadow Warriors to destroy, that made the people afraid of him. Ignoring his own welfare, though concerned with the lives of those around him, he would slice and stab, laying waste to every life his sword could drain, laughing in the face of death. He was his most cruel during those forays with the men who had been responsible for his torture in the bowels of the Tribunal Inquisition Hall, and he looked into the face of every guard, keeping watch for one in particular. No guard ever struck blades with him and lived to tell the tale.
    "Do you know Tymothy Kullen?" he would ask them before they died.
    It was not only his volume of bloodletting on the battlefields that he did to excess. Everything was beyond the normal: drinking, fighting, whoring. It seemed to his men as though he was trying to cram those seven years of hell into the one he was presently living. On occasion, his eyes would go dull, and he would cocoon himself even deeper in his self-inflicted web of silence, his manner even more forbidding, morose, and he would defy anyone to impugn on his withdrawal under penalty of pain.
    It was during those times when he would turn toward the distant crenelated