by Paul S. Kemp
“There’s no one here,” he announced to the night. He had imagined the sound, had imported the terror of his nightmare into his bedroom.
He had dreamed of the dread, or what he imagined the dread to be. He had run and run through a featureless, unending maze, all the while dogged from behind by a clawed black vision of unspeakable evil. He had heard it sniffing for him, chuffing like a hound. Periodically, it had called out to him. “Little puke,” it had hissed. “Little puke.”
“Puke,” he breathed, and chuckled in relief. He had scared himself witless!
No longer afraid, but still flushed from the rush of fear, he pined again for Arlanni, the slim, taut young woman who had been warming his bed for the past few days. She had left in a huff after a spat over the dinner roast.
Too bad Arlanni was so damned difficult. It made her all the more appealing, of course, he thought with a smile. Thinking of her long blonde hair and firm thighs, he grew warm with excitement. I should send a messenger for her this instant, he resolved.
He sat up again and reached for the small bronze bell that sat on his nightstand. Increasingly eager for Arlanni’s body, he shook it urgently. Its soft chime reverberated through his large bedroom. Hov would be along in a moment.
The big man had taken to standing watch outside his door since the incident with Riven.
Such a diligent worker … a pity, Verdrinal thought, too much work makes a man a dullard. He again shook the bell. “Hov,” he called, “Hov.”
Before Verdrinal took another breath the darkness to his right suddenly came to life. A shadowy figure rushed him. A fist grabbed him by the hair and jerked him roughly down on the bed.
“Aiiee—” The feel of cold steel at his throat silenced his scream.
A body slithered close, stinking breath felt hot on his cheek. “Hov can’t help you,” said a voice.
Drasek Riven’s voice.
A shudder shook Verdrinal’s body when he heard the coldness in the assassin’s tone. This was not the emotionally volatile Riven that had argued with him yesterday in his study. This was Drasek Riven the professional killer, one of the best assassins the Zhentarim had ever trained, and he was on a job.
Verdrinal heard clear as a bell the promise of blood in Riven’s sinister, emotionless voice. He knew with certainty that the assassin had come to kill him. Instead of growing strong with adrenaline, Verdrinal’s body froze with fear.
“Hov can’t help anyone anymore,” Riven continued. Still holding the dagger at Verdrinal’s throat, he held up with his other hand a jagged piece of meat and dangled it over Verdrinal’s eyes.
Hov’s tongue.
Warm droplets of blood peppered Verdrinal’s cheeks and mouth. He twisted his face to the side and clamped his mouth closed. His eyes fell on his bedroom door—Hov’s cooling body must be slumped on the floor just outside.
“You don’t like that, eh?” Riven chuckled spitefully and laid Hov’s tongue on Verdrinal’s chest. “Well, he didn’t like it much either. But he had it coming.”
Riven’s laugh made Verdrinal want to vomit. He thought about fighting back, but couldn’t bring himself to move. Fear paralyzed him. He knew he was going to die, but he found himself unwilling to do anything that might speed the inevitable. He clutched desperately to every heartbeat that remained in his chest.
“Why?” he peeped at last.
“Why!” Riven leaned over him and looked him in the face. “Because you’re a liability, and I lost six men.” All in one lightning fast motion, Riven stabbed Verdrinal through the cheek, withdrew the blade, and replaced the tip against Verdrinal’s throat.
“Aargh!” In agony, Verdrinal kicked and flailed with his legs. Riven’s blade forced him to keep his neck motionless.
The assassin grinned and cuffed Verdrinal across the face. Verdrinal, a nobleman of Selgaunt, began to cry. Riven cuffed him again, harder.
“Shut up. The fact that you didn’t see this coming only makes my point—you’re a liability.”
Eyes watering, Verdrinal lay motionless. Blood ran down his face from the hole in his cheek and collected in a warm pool on his pillow.
“I’ve killed good men for less,” Riven said. “Did you think I’d let this pass from you, an incompetent little puke?”
Verdrinal made no answer. Little puke. He hadn’t been dreaming. Something dark had been hunting him, a shadowy thing that had called him a little puke. Not the dread though, Drasek Riven.
The blade pressed harder into the flesh of his throat. He closed his eyes and waited for death. It didn’t come.
Riven’s free hand clamped painfully on Verdrinal’s cheeks and jerked his head sidewise. Verdrinal looked into the assassin’s eerily calm face, stared blankly into the hole where Riven’s eye should be.
“I thought all night about what you said, about how the dread was doing our work for us, and how we would kill it afterward. But then I asked myself why Malix would leave the city without telling me and leave you in charge? Do you know what I realized?”
Verdrinal didn’t make a move, didn’t dare reply.
“I realized that he didn’t tell me because I would recognize that explanation as dung! Malix doesn’t know what to do, you idiot! That’s why he went to Zhentil Keep. To get help. This demon is running rampant in the city and he doesn’t have a godsdamned clue as to how to deal with it.” Riven’s voice lowered to a hiss. “So he left you in charge, because you’re too stupid to see it.”
Verdrinal would have protested but knew it would be futile. Riven’s one black eye looked colder and emptier than the hole in his other socket. There could be no explaining to that eye. Verdrinal kept silent and tried to stop the tears from flowing down his face. He didn’t want to die while crying.
Riven leaned in close. “I lost six men because of Malix’s idiocy and your incompetence. Malix will answer to me later. You’ll answer to me now.”
“The Zhentarim will force you out of the organization,” Verdrinal desperately whispered.
“Maybe,” Riven conceded. “But I don’t care.”
A sharp stab of pain raced across Verdrinal’s throat, followed by a cascade of warmth that spilled down his chest and poured down his windpipe. He coughed and gurgled, but strangely, felt no pain. He reached for his throat and felt his life pouring through his fingers from the open gash in his neck.
I’m dying, he thought. Spots exploded in his head. He tried to squirm from the bed but his body would not move. He reached a weak hand up to grab at Riven but the assassin seemed too far away. His vision started to go black.
He heard himself gurgling away the last of his life. He felt the soaked sheets sticking to his body. Riven’s voice carried across the void and filled his ears.
“I’m in charge now,” he said.
Verdrinal tried to laugh, gurgled instead, then died.
The snow and wind had stopped. Breathless, Jak and Cale stood in the shadows of an alley beside Emellia’s. The sounds of that most human of pastimes carried through the brothel’s shutters.
“Not exactly shy, are they?” Jak observed with a soft chuckle.
Cale smiled despite himself. Now that they had begun to work, Jak seemed to have shaken his trepidation and regained his usual carefree sense of humor. Still, they needed to stay focused. Across Ariness Street was the guildhouse. The street itself was empty.
“I don’t see any guards,” Cale observed. “Didn’t last time, either. You?”
“No. No one on the roof, either.”
Cale continued to study the guildhouse, thinking. Assuming things had not gotten markedly worse, he knew what to expect in the basement. He also knew from his combat with the shadow demon in Stormweather that they would need enchanted weapons to destroy the demons. Jak had nothing but a luckstone. Cale had nothing at all. He rebuked himself for not keeping Thazienne’s enchanted dagger.
“There’s an armory on the first floor, toward the back of the building. The guild keeps a few magical weapons there, in case
they are ever needed by a guild member for a job. They aren’t very powerful. The Righteous Man kept anything of power for himself. But they’ll be better than nothing.”
Jak blew out a misty-frozen sigh and nodded. “Good idea. We’ll need magical weapons to face the demons.” He turned and looked at Cale. “What’s the play, though? How do we get in?”
Cale knew there to be only two entrances to the guildhouse, the sewers and the front doors. Before, when he had come in by way of the sewer entrance, he had barely escaped with his life. While not superstitious, he would not go in the same way twice.
“We’re walking through the front doors,” he said, and started across the street.
Halfway to the guildhouse’s porch, he pulled his long sword from its scabbard. Beside him, Jak jerked free a short sword and dagger.
Come on, you bastards, he challenged the cold night air, but nothing happened. They gained the porch without incident and faced the sturdy double doors.
“The hairs on my arms are standing up,” Jak softly observed.
“You’re just cold,” Cale said, though he knew the statement to be false. His hairs also stood on end. The air around the guildhouse tasted polluted. He felt an ominous prickling in his body that made him shudder. He tried to ignore the feeling and placed his hand on the door handle. If it was locked, even Jak would have difficulty picking it.
The handle turned. Cale and Jak blew out frozen breaths simultaneously. They shared a look.
“It opens in,” Cale whispered. “To better expose as a target anyone trying to force their way in.” Jak nodded. Cale began to push against the oak slab. It wouldn’t budge. Something blocked it.
“There’s something on the other side,” he said, and prepared to throw his body against it. “Ready?”
Jak sheathed his sword and dagger, drew three throwing knives, and positioned himself to the left of the door. “Ready.”
With a grunt, Cale slammed his shoulder into the door. Whatever blocked it slid clear and the door flew all the way open. Jak leaped into the opening behind Cale, daggers ready. Cale, long sword before him, slid sidewise to give Jak a wide berth to throw.
Enough light from the street spilled into the room to depict a scene of terrible destruction. Tables, chairs, beds, and piles of unidentifiable debris lay scattered about. A pile of four mildewed straw mattresses had blocked the door. A musty, rotten smell wafted from the door. The smell of smoke lingered in the air—the aftereffect from Cale’s earlier missile explosion in the basement.
“Stinks,” Jak said. He sheathed his throwing knives and again drew his short sword and fighting dagger.
“Get used to it,” Cale replied.
Jak stepped fully through the doorway and poked the mattresses with his short sword. “Why the mattresses? How’re they getting in and out?”
Cale shrugged off his backpack and pulled out a torch. “Sewers, probably. Hells, I don’t know. There’s no making sense of what’s going on in here, Jak.”
Before Cale could remove his tinderbox, Jak stopped him. “Here.” The little man pulled forth the metallic rod that he had used to illuminate their way through Selgaunt’s sewers a month ago. As he held it, a blue light sparked in its tip and grew to a soft glow.
“I’m surprised to see you still have that thing,” Cale observed.
“I don’t use it much.”
“Does it do anything else?”
Jak frowned thoughtfully and studied the rod. “I don’t think so.” He crouched and aimed it purposefully across the street. “Kill!” It did nothing.
“Just the glow, it seems,” Jak said with a smile.
“Lucky for the girls at Emellia’s,” Cale said grinning. “Give it here then. You can’t carry it and fight two-handed.”
Jak handed it over. His hand trembled slightly. Cale pretended not to notice.
He knew how Jak felt but they could not turn back now.
“Let’s go,” he said, summoning his own courage. They walked into the guildhouse.
The smell of corpses permeated the stuffy air. Within a few moments, Cale’s nose became inured to the smell. Moving warily through the ruined offices, Cale and Jak had to pick their way through the overturned chairs, desks, and scattered papers.
“Keep your eyes on the shadows,” Cale said tensely. He tightened the grip of his sweaty palms on the sword hilt and rod.
“Right,” Jak said with a nod, his eyes watchful of every corner, both blades held high and ready.
They cautiously navigated room after room, but apart from the toppled, broken furniture, the offices seemed to have escaped the warping and foulness that had occurred in the basement. No corpses, no voids, no blood, no demons. Only the ubiquitous charnel reek that announced the presence of ghouls nearby.
Silent as specters, they prowled farther into the house. When the two reached the end of the offices, Cale held up a hand to signal Jak to stop.
“That door,” he said, and nodded at the oak door before them, “leads into the guildhouse proper. To reach the armory, we go down the hall to the right, then left down a flight of stairs, then right down another hall. Can’t miss it.”
Jak nodded as he memorized the directions. He mopped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Do you think they’ve abandoned the upper floor?”
“Maybe. No way to tell. We’ll find out soon enough.” Cale stared into Jak’s eyes. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Jak replied. “Let’s hope the Trickster and Lady Luck are in a good mood.”
Cale stepped forward, knelt at the door, and listened. Nothing in the hallway beyond. He stood and tried to turn the handle. It was jammed.
“Dark,” he oathed. He held the rod before the keyhole and peered in. Jak crept close and looked over his shoulder. “The locking mechanism’s been deliberately mangled.” He looked back at Jak. “Can you pick it?”
“Not if the tumblers are bent,” Jak replied. “But I can still get it open.” He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his holy cloak-clasp, and muttered the words to a spell. The air around his small hands began to grow charged. Cale backed a step away from the door.
When Jak finished the incantation and pointed his holy symbol at the lock, the magic of the spell forced the twisted metal in the mechanism to disentangle itself. Tumblers fell into place, metal ground against metal and shrieked like a dying man. Cale winced at the sound. If anything stood nearby, it would have heard them.
In three heartbeats, the door popped ajar. Cale pulled Jak behind him and jerked the door open, his blade ready.
The narrow hallway stretched to the left and right, dark beyond the limits of the wand’s blue light. As with the rest of the guildhouse, debris lay cast haphazardly about on the floor, the ghouls and demons seemingly intent on destroying or befouling any semblance of normalcy.
Despite the chaos, Cale now felt surprisingly calm. Either he would succeed or he would die.
The little man, on the other hand, seemed balanced on a sword’s edge, at one moment his cocky, adventurous self, at the next moment frightened beyond words. Cale could hear the nervousness in Jak’s harsh breathing, though the halfling tried to mask it.
I shouldn’t have brought him, Cale thought guiltily. Jak had not come to succeed or die. Nor had he come to avenge Thazienne. He had come because Cale was his friend and Cale had asked him to come.
I don’t want him to die for that, he thought. He resolved to ensure Jak’s safety no matter what.
“You feel that?” Jak asked nervously.
Cale nodded. He felt it. The air in the hallway seemed as heavy as an autumn fog, pregnant with the stink of something vile. A distant pulsing, felt rather than heard, thumped at intervals like the beat of a giant, foul heart.
“What is it?” Jak asked.
“I don’t know,” Cale softly replied. He tightened his grip on the long sword.
Jak looked at him sharply, eyes wide, but said nothing. The little man’s hand went to his holy symbol.
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“This way,” Cale said, and headed right.
After walking only fifteen paces, they encountered the first signs of warping. The blue light of Jak’s wand illuminated a vacant spot in the hallway floor. The emptiness utterly swallowed the light. The pulsing seemed to originate from somewhere within the void. With each pulse, Cale’s loose clothes and the hairs on his arms were pulled toward the distortion.
“ ’Ware that, Jak. I don’t know what it is, but we can expect more of them. Lots more. I think the shadow demon can move through them.”
Jak walked past Cale, stood at the edge of the emptiness, and peered within.
“Careful,” Cale warned again. He recalled the hypnotic effect one of these vacancies had on him in the guildhouse basement. He also recalled the malice-filled yellow eyes he had seen staring at him out of one.
“I think it’s a gate,” Jak ventured.
Cale stepped forward and peered within. The pull never got too strong, but it was nevertheless disconcerting. “A gate? To where? Yrsillar’s plane?”
Jak could only shrug.
Snarls suddenly erupted from somewhere behind. Jak gasped and whirled, blades ready. Cale leaped before him in a fighting crouch.
As suddenly as they had begun, the snarls died out and vanished.
Cale held the wand aloft and walked a few steps back the way they had come. Nothing. Inspired, he knelt and placed his ear to the floor. From below, the distant sound of snarls carried through the floorboards.
“Came through the floorboards,” he said, and stood. “They must have been right below us.”
Jak let his weapons sag and visibly relaxed. “Dark,” he oathed. “Startled me.”
“Me too.”
“They coming up?” Jak asked.
“I don’t know.” He walked past Jak, faced the emptiness of the gate, and estimated its width—five feet, maybe six. “Can you jump over this?”
“Easy.” Without another word, Jak sheathed his weapons, backed up a few steps, raced forward, and leaped over the gate. He cleared it easily and landed in a crouch. In a flash, he had his blades redrawn and stood at the ready, waiting for Cale.