He awakened drenched with perspiration, despite the slight chill in the air. It seemed as if the noxious odors of that place had come to him briefly and in their fullest intensity once again.

It was not until considerably later that he was able to finish his rations.

But the hatred sustained him; it nourished him. It quenched his thirst or caused him to forget it. It gave him the strength to walk another league whenever his body bade him to lie down.

He plotted their ends, again and again. He saw the racks and the pincers, the flames and the braces. He heard their screams and their pleas. In the lower chambers of his mind, he saw the gobbets of flesh and gouts of blood and rivers of tears he would extract from them before he allowed them to die.

...And he knew that despite the pains of this journey, it was the wound in his pride that stung most. To be taken so easily, handled so casually, dismissed so abruptly-it was like the swatting of an annoying insect. They did not treat him as if he were the power that walked the shadowland, but rather as if he were a common thief!

This is why he thought in terms of torture rather than a simple sword thrust. They had hurt his feelings by killing him in this manner. Had they done it differently, he might have been less aggrieved. The Lord of Bats, it was he whose guile stirred by envy and revenge had planned such an insult. He would pay.

Hating, he drove himself onward. Although the hatred warmed him, it did not serve to prevent an increasing awareness that the temperature was growing colder. This was so despite the fact that he had not attained a significantly greater altitude for a long while.

He lay upon his back and studied the dark globe that occluded stars at midheaven. It was the focus of the Shield forces-that sphere held perpetually away from dayside's light-and someone should be seeing to its maintenance Where were the seven Powers of the listing in the Book of Ells, whose turn it would be to run Shield duty? Surely, whatever the internecine warfare of the moment, no Power would fail to observe a Shield truce when the fate of the entire world depended on it. Jack himself had run it countless times-even in league with the Lord of Bats on two occasions.