Adam folded the two letters from Commander Soulshadow and tucked them away in the chest. For a moment, the room around him blurred.

Instead of the old Poste Office where he and Alraune made their home now, Adam saw the high ceilings and gray stone walls of the Tower of Dreams, beyond immeasurable distances of time and dimension, a place that might not to exist at all, save as a memory, and what was a memory but a waking dream?

In his new conviction to have no convictions, to be a leaf upon the flow of life’s river, Adam had given up his quest for knowledge of the daemon Charnadis and, now, here was opportunity. Once he had heard a sage pronounce that the surest way to attain a goal was to cease its seeking, and he wondered now if that bit of seeming nonsense was true. The commander’s letters might offer Adam the possibility to learn if the daemon was a part of this world as he had been part of that lost world of memory where the Tower of Dreams reached above the treetops of Spiritwood.

Adam knew the lore.

Once the world had been a single gem, as vast as creation, but some cataclysm shattered the jewel of the universe into countless fragments, faceted shards that lay now like stars in the firmament of time and space, and moment to moment the shards changed so that the differences between them multiplied constantly. But there were similarities and parallels, twisted and hard to see, even if one had the gift of viewing multiple facets of the broken gem.

In the world of Adam’s memory, a daemon named Charnadis had been imprisoned by the wizard Relvinian in the hedge maze. Charnadis was a minor daemon, one of the sort that delighted in playing with human souls, binding them to their own desires, especially for wickedness and destruction. On a dark night, before Adam was born, Adam’s father had tarried unwisely in the hedge maze with an evil woman, a vampire whose nature was amoral and sadistic, and what passed between them no one knew, but their actions had freed the daemon and, with the aid of powerful magic, Charnadis had been bound again, this time in the body of a black devil of a horse, Adam’s legacy when he grew to manhood.

And that had been the beginning of a long season in hell.

Charnadis could only enter a human form if the name of the daemon had been marked in the skin of the mortal he possessed, so that the name was a doorway into damnation . . . and experience.

Adam’s breath caught in his chest at the tangle of memories, wine like sunlight, an ecstasy of sensation in the touch of a single finger, obliteration of his being in the heat of Alraune’s desire, cruelty as natural as breath, the savor of blood, of meat cut from the thighs of a victim, the seduction of his soul and the glorious rising of a black sun.

The name cut in scars on Adam’s back by a ring of living bone still moved, like mouths whispering.

The question, the real question that Adam forced himself to ask, was, did Charnadis live in this world? In the shattered faces of the gem of the universe, had some portion of the daemon been bound here too? Did he wait in the maze, or elsewhere, for sweet release? Was it Adam’s destiny to find Charnadis again?

And if he found the daemon, what then?

Destroy him, Adam said to himself, but his lips still tasted the wine, pure and rich as sunlight.

And he remembered the shadows cast by the black sun, golden as the daemon’s eyes.