Into the Labyrinth by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman

accorded tofew. He glanced down ruefully at his wet and slept-in clothes. The Ancient, understanding, offered to provide a clean shirt. The old man hinted at breakfast, but Hugh shook his head emphatically.
    Washed and dressed, the throbbing in his temples receding to an ache behind his eyeballs, Hugh presented himself once again to Ciang, the Brotherhood’s “arm.”
    Ciang’s chambers were enormous, sumptuously and fancifully decorated in the style elves admire and humans find ostentatious. All the furniture was of carved wood, extremely rare in the Mid Realms. The elven emperor Agah’ran would have opened his painted eyelids wide with envy at the sight of so many valuable and beautiful pieces. The massive bed was a work of art. Four posts, carved in the shapes of mythological beasts, each perched on the head of another, supported a canopy of wood decorated with the same beasts lying outstretched, paws extended. From each paw dangled a golden ring. Suspended from the rings was a silken curtain of fabulous weave, color, and design. It was whispered that the curtain had magical properties, that it accounted for the elven woman’s longer than normal life span.
    Whether or not that was true, the curtain was marvelously lovely to look on and seemed to invite admiration. Hugh had never before been inside Ciang’s personal quarters. He stared at the shimmering multicolored curtain in awe, lifted his hand and reached out to it before it occurred to him what he was doing. Flushing, he started to snatch his hand back, but Ciang, seated in a high-backed monstrosity of a chair, gestured.
    “You may touch it, my friend. It will do you some good.”
    Hugh, recalling the rumors, wasn’t certain that he wanted to touch the curtain, but to do otherwise would offend Ciang. He ran his fingers over it gingerly and was startled to feel a pleasurable exhilaration tingle through his body. At this he did snatch his fingers back, but the feeling lasted and he found his head clear, the pain gone.
    Ciang was seated on the opposite side of the large room. Diamond-paned windows, which stretched from ceiling to floor, admitted a flood of sunlight. Hugh walked across the bright bands of light spanning the ornate rugs to stand before the high-backed wooden chair.
    The chair was said to have been carved by an admirer of Ciang’s, given to her as a present. It was certainly grotesque. A skull leered at the top. The blood-red cushions that supported Ciang’s frail form were surrounded by various ghostly spirits twining their way upward. Her feet rested on a footstool formed of crouching, cringing naked bodies. She waved a hand in a gracious gesture to a chair opposite hers, a chair which Hugh was relieved to see was perfectly ordinary in appearance.
    Ciang dispensed with meaningless pleasantries and struck, arrow-like, at the heart of their business.
    “I have spent the night in study.” She rested her hand, gnarled and almost fleshless but elegant in its movement and grace, on the dusty leather cover of a book in her lap.
    “I am sorry to have disturbed your sleep,” Hugh began to apologize.
    Ciang cut him off. “To be honest, I could not have slept otherwise. You are a disturbing influence, Hugh the Hand,” she added, looking at him with narrowed eyes. “I will not be sorry to see you go. I have done what I could to speed you on your way.” The eyelids—lashless, as the head was hairless—blinked once. “When you are gone, do not come back.”
    Hugh understood. The next time there would be no hesitation. The archer would have his orders. Hugh’s face set hard and grim. “I would not have come back in any case,” he said softly, staring at the cringing bodies, bent to hold Ciang’s small and delicate-boned feet. “If Haplo doesn’t kill me then I must find—”
    “What did you say?” Ciang demanded sharply.
    Hugh, startled, glanced up at her. He frowned. “I said that if I don’t kill Haplo—”
    “No!” Ciang’s fist