by Paul S. Kemp
Cale winced, once more reminded of Mask’s seeming beneficence, once more reminded of the call. The felt mask in his pocket weighed like a stone.
Only when and if I’m ready, he thought to the Shadowlord. Stop pushing.
“Can we get out of here?”
Jak took his pipe from his mouth and regarded Cale with raised eyebrows. “I don’t know.”
Cale appreciated the frankness. “The gate?”
Jak eyed the empty air above Cale’s head. “That’s where it materialized, but it must be one-way only. It doesn’t even appear on this side unless someone is passing through from the other side.” Seeing Cale’s frown, he added, “Maybe there’s another one somewhere else.”
Maybe. Frustration and anger rose in Cale like a red tide. That they could have come so far only to die in this damnable extra-planar desert enraged him. He would not let Yrsillar win, he could not. Not after what had been done to Thazienne and Stormweather. The demon would pay, by Mask.
By Mask? He gave a slight start, surprised at himself.
“You all right?” Jak asked.
Cale took a deep breath, quelled his frustration and his surprise. Anger would not get them out of here. “I’m all right,” he replied.
Jak nodded, pulled his pipe from between his teeth, and placed it back in his belt pouch. “Cale, whatever we’re going to do, we’ve got to do it soon. I don’t think our protective spells are going to last very long. At least mine won’t.”
Cale ignored the implication in Jak’s last statement. “Let’s get moving then,” he said. “We’ve got to find a way back to the guildhouse—”
Without warning, the earth buckled and roiled like the storm-tossed whitecaps of Selgaunt Bay. Cale’s vision blurred. The world spun. The landscape dissolved into a gray haze. Unbalanced, his stomach churned and his knees buckled. He struggled to stay upright. He felt himself streaming forward through space, out of control. The blurry landscape whipped past, a continuous sheet of indistinguishable gray. He felt sure that at any moment he would be slammed into the side of a basalt slab and pulverized. He tried to speak but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
“Jaaalllkk!”
As though through a howling wind, he heard Jak’s poorly articulated reply. “Caaeelllc!” The little man was still with him.
He couldn’t turn his head to look at Jak, could hardly keep his feet under him.
Without warning, the sensation of motion ceased.
Cale bent over double from the abrupt stop, gasping, but managed to keep his feet by catching himself with a palm on the ground. Beside him, Jak stumbled willy-nilly across the planked floor and slammed against the wall. He recovered himself quickly and looked around, wide-eyed and gasping. Only then did their location hit Cale.
Floor? Wall?
Floor and wall indeed. He looked around in disbelief. “What in the Hells?”
“Burn me,” Jak oathed.
They stood in the guildhouse. Or at least, they stood in something that looked very much like the guildhouse. Planked floors, rough-hewn stone walls and stairs leading down to a basement. The whole building was composed of the drab, gray color of the void, as though the guildhouse had been remade with the stuff of the Abyss. Reeling, Cale struggled to comprehend what had happened. He turned circles and gawked.
“Dark,” Jak breathed. “What happened?”
Cale placed his hands on his hips and shook his head, dumbfounded. “I don’t know. Where are we, Jak?
“How should I kn—”
Jak’s abrupt stop pulled Cale around in alarm. He turned to see Jak’s eyes glued to the demon’s corpse on the floor. The same demon’s corpse. Relative to Cale and Jak, the twisted body lay exactly where it had been previous to the motion.
“How—”
Jak waved Cale silent, eyes still on the demon. “Let me think a minute.”
Cale watched his face and waited, and wondered. How did the demon’s corpse move with us? What was going on?
So far as he could tell, the abyssal guildhouse seemed an exact copy of the real guildhouse. To be safe, he drew his long sword and kept his eyes on the stairway above and below.
“Gods, Cale,” Jak said. “I don’t think we’ve moved!”
Cale turned around to face him. “What?”
“We haven’t moved,” Jak said again, nodding. “I’m certain of it.”
Cale didn’t get it. They had been in a desert, and now they were in the guildhouse—of course they had moved.
“How can we not have moved? I felt us move.”
“That wasn’t motion,” Jak replied. “It was … reality changing.”
Involuntarily, Cale’s eyes fell to the demon’s corpse—exactly the same distance and direction from him as it had been before. He pulled his waterskin from his belt and had a gulp, glad now that he had thought to bring water. “What do you mean?” He offered the skin to Jak but the little man declined.
“This plane is nothingness, Cale,” Jak explained. “Literally, nothingness. The gray wasteland from before—that was me. I expected the Abyss to be a wasteland and it was. The plane shaped itself to my expectations. Or my expectations shaped the plane. You see? Just before the guildhouse appeared—”
Cale nodded in sudden understanding. “I said, ‘we’ve got to get to the guildhouse.’ ” He looked over at Jak, still not quite believing. “You’re saying that I made this, then?”
“You made it,” Jak affirmed with a nod. “Your desire made it. Your expectations, your will, whatever. You made it.”
Cale tried to make sense of that. His mind rebelled, but he slowly got his intellectual hands around the idea.
In the end, it really didn’t matter whether they had physically moved or had themselves moved reality. Here they were, and they still needed to find a gate back, fast. The golden auras still sparked and sizzled, at war with the energy of the void. There was no telling how long they would last.
“So what now?” Jak asked. He reached for his pipe out of habit but stopped himself before reaching the drawstring on his pouch.
After a moment, Cale made the only decision he could. “Let’s move,” he announced.
“Where to?” Jak asked.
“To the basement,” Cale said grimly. “Just like we had planned before. Let’s see if anyone’s home in this guildhouse.”
Cale led as they warily descended the stairs, blades held ready before them. Silence reigned—the silence of the dead. Their breathing, sharp and tense, sounded to Cale as loud as a scream. The stairs evidenced no warping on this side of reality. Like the gates, the warping seemed to be only one way. He kept his back pressed to the inner wall as he spiraled down the stairs.
As with everything on this plane, a dim light with no apparent source illuminated the interior of the abyssal guildhouse. Through the gray, Cale could see clearly for only a short span, beyond he could only make out blurred shapes and movement.
“Light spell?” Jak whispered from behind him.
“No,” Cale softly replied over his shoulder. If there were anything at home here, a light spell would only draw its attention. Gripping his enchanted long sword in a sweaty hand, he advanced. Ahead and below, the archway that opened onto the long hallway in the basement beckoned.
He turned to Jak and spoke in a hushed whisper. “That archway opens onto the main hall. The shrine is to the left. To the right, the hall ends with the storeroom. I’m thinking left.”
“Left,” Jak agreed with a nod. “But remember Cale, you’re looking for a gate back to our plane, not the demon.”
Without reply, Cale briskly turned to go—if he saw Yrsillar, he intended to put the bastard down—but Jak grabbed him by the arm and pulled him around.
“Listen, Cale, godsdammit,” the little man whispered sharply. “Demons are stronger on their own planes. We don’t want to face Yrsillar here. We don’t. Burn me, but we don’t want to face anything here. We need to get back to our own plane first.”
Cale
stared expressionlessly into the little man’s eyes. Again he made no reply. He could make no promises. If an opportunity to fight Yrsillar presented itself—here or back on their plane—he would not pass it up, not unless it meant putting Jak in unnecessary danger.
Seeing his expression, the little man apparently understood his resolve. He released Cale’s arm. “I’m with you either way, though,” he said with a sigh.
Cale tried to reassure him. “I want to find a way back too, little man. I also want Yrsillar dead. I’ll try not to let the one get in the way of the other.”
Jak seemed to accept that. “I want him dead too, Cale.” He hesitated a moment before adding, “If we kill him on his own plane, he’s dead forever.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that if we kill him on our plane, we only kill his manifestation there. That doesn’t really kill him. It just prevents him from returning to our plane for a century or so. But if we kill him here …”
“We kill him for real and forever,” Cale finished.
Jak nodded. “But it’s harder, Cale, much harder. Like I said, he’d be more powerful here, not as easy as that shadow demon you killed before going through the gate.”
Cale leaned against the wall while he digested the information. It probably did not matter much. He had no reason to think that Yrsillar moved back and forth between this plane and their home plane. This guildhouse was probably empty. They had to find a gate back.
“What will a gate back look like?”
Jak shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. But I think we’ll know it when we see it.”
Cale gave a nod, and with that, they descended the rest of the stairway. When they reached the archway to the main hall, Cale stopped short and peeked around the corner. Jak squirmed between his body and the wall and did the same. Their simultaneous intake of breath was as sharp as a blade, but neither could look away.
As would have been the case with the main hallway in the real guildhouse, the hallway here stretched left to the shrine and right to the storeroom. Doors dotted the walls, some open, but most were closed. No garbage littered the floor here, and the smooth, unwarped floor was bare except for some twenty or so indistinct gray forms.
Positioned at intervals along the hallway, they crouched low to the ground as though hiding behind something Cale couldn’t see. If not for their occasional movement, he would have thought them an illusion, a trick of his eyes in the twilight. But they did move, and they were real.
Composed of swirling gray vapor, Cale could distinguish no facial features, could barely make out the rudiments of a man-sized bipedal form. The beings waited in absolute silence. Though Cale and Jak stared in amazement, the beings showed no signs of having seen them.
Abruptly one stood and loped back down the hall toward another pair that flanked the shrine doors.
It loped.
Cale recognized the movement. His eyes narrowed.
Jak must have sensed his sudden tension, for he asked in a whisper, “What are they?”
Afraid one of the creatures would hear, Cale grabbed Jak by the collar and ducked back behind the archway.
“Ghouls,” Cale replied in a whisper. He held his blade ready and kept his ears attuned for the sounds of the approaching pack.
Rather than fear, Jak looked at him with a furrowed brow. “Ghouls? Those aren’t ghouls.” He peeked back around the corner. Cale did too.
“Wait until one moves,” Cale said. “There.”
One of the figures rose and crossed the hall. Though indistinct and vaporous, Cale couldn’t mistake its low crouch, hunched back, and loping stride. Neither did Jak. The little man gave a start and both again retreated into the archway.
“Trickster’s toes,” Jak softly oathed.
“What kind of ghouls are those?” Cale hissed. “What is going on here?”
Jak looked as dumbfounded as Cale. “Let me think,” he replied softly, and stroked his whiskers. “Let me think.”
While Jak considered, Cale looked into the hall and kept his eyes on the misty forms of the ghouls. He did a headcount, twenty-six, all of them crouching low, all of them trying to hide in plain sight. Cale began to work through the rudiments of an attack. Though he could not distinguish features, he felt certain that some of the ghostly ghouls looked right at him. Yet none moved to attack. Their unnatural silence sent a chill up his spine. He ducked back. There was nothing to do but to attack head-on.
“It’s like they’re waiting to ambush us,” he said to Jak, and readied himself for a charge.
Cale had anticipated an ambush in the guildhouse basement—in the real guildhouse basement—but he hadn’t expected so many ghouls. Between the battle at Stormweather and Cale’s necklace of missiles, Cale figured over thirty already had been killed. The Night Knives had numbered no more than forty men all told. Yrsillar must have transformed more Selgauntans into ghouls than just the Night Knives. He shuddered to think of what might have happened at Stormweather if the attack had succeeded, if he had not driven off the shadow demon.
“They are waiting for us,” Jak suddenly exclaimed, and snapped his fingers.
“Quiet,” Cale hissed, and looked in alarm around the corner. Except for an occasional shift of position, the ghouls hadn’t moved.
“They can’t hear us,” Jak said aloud. “And they can’t see us either.”
Before Cale could stop him, the little man stepped brazenly out into the hallway. Cursing, Cale leaped out beside him, blade ready for the swarming pack.
The ghouls showed no sign of noticing anything amiss. Though Cale and Jak stood in plain sight, they continued to crouch and wait.
With one eye still on the misty ghouls, Cale looked to the little man.
“They’re like the shadow demon, Cale, but in reverse. This vapor shape is their manifestation on this plane. Like the shadowy form of the demon is its manifestation on our plane.” He stated it as though it were obvious, but Cale’s confusion must have shown on his face.
“The transformation from man to ghoul must result in some sort of dual existence, part of them here, close to the Abyss, but most of them—their corporeal form—on our plane.” Jak tapped his chin and went on, “But they aren’t powerful like a demon, are they? No, they have a dual existence, but must not have a dual consciousness. They can’t see into this plane, which means that they can’t see us.” He looked up, smiling. “Cale, this guildhouse must correspond to the real guildhouse. Back on our plane, these ghouls are waiting for us in the real basement, but they can’t see us here in this basement.” His hand went from his chin to the luckstone at his belt and he smiled broadly. “Mask isn’t the only one with us tonight, Erevis. The Lady’s decided to come along as well.”
Cale couldn’t argue. He looked around at the ghouls crouching, lurking, ignorant of their presence mere feet away. The little man’s theory fit the facts. Cale could picture the ghouls’ fleshy forms back on their plane with their stinking, rotted skin, filthy claws, and vicious fangs. He realized that the ghouls crouched like this because they were hiding in the real basement, behind toppled chairs and debris that didn’t manifest in the abyssal guildhouse.
They couldn’t see or hear him, but he could see them. He had only one question.
“Can we kill them?”
Jak’s pleased expression grew more serious at the thought of killing. “I don’t know.”
Cale advanced a few steps down the hallway, vengeance for Stormweather on his mind. “Only one way to find out.”
Jak grabbed him around the wrist. “Wait, Cale.”
Cale stopped, looked into his friend’s green eyes. The little man looked uncertain. His gaze looked past Cale to the misty ghouls. “Erevis. How can we do this? I can’t fight a creature that can’t defend itself.”
Cale placed a hand on Jak’s shoulder. “They’re evil, Jak. We’ll do it quick and clean.”
Jak still looked unsure so Cale gave him a slight shake, knelt down, and looked hard into
his eyes. “I know they were men once, Jak. But what they were doesn’t matter now, only what they are. They’re evil, and we have to do it.”
Jak looked back at the ghouls, then at Cale. He gave a slow nod.
Cale patted him on the shoulder and rose. “You wait here, little man. Leave this to me.”
With that, he walked past Jak and into the hall. The ghouls did nothing as he closed, merely waited in an ambush that would never occur. After a moment, Jak fell into step beside him, short sword and dagger bared.
“I said I’m with you, Cale.”
Cale gave a hard nod and together they advanced on the nearest ghoul. Still no sign of alarm. Cale stood over the crouching creature with enchanted blade held high. It looked right at where he stood, unseeing, ignorant of the threat.
Gritting his teeth, Cale cut through its throat with a powerful forward slash. He needn’t have swung so hard. The feel of the blow reminded him of the way it had felt to wound the shadow demon back on their home plane, slight resistance, then sudden give. Like slashing a pudding.
No flood of purple spilled to the floor, and no scream of pain resounded in the hall. The ghostly ghoul clutched its throat, writhed silently on the ground, and suddenly disappeared. Cale wondered if back in the real guildhouse, purple blood had pooled about the nearly beheaded corpse of a ghoul.
Must have, he thought, because the hallway erupted into motion.
Misty ghouls lurched from their hiding places and charged to the point where the body would lay. There they stopped, confused. Seeking an unseen foe, they turned about and clawed at the air. So many surrounded Cale and Jak that they seemed engulfed in the morning fog that rolled off the Elzhimmer River—located off the far shore of Selgaunt Bay—most autumn mornings.
Cale gave Jak a reassuring glance, then the two friends set to work.
Grim-faced, Jak ran one through with his enchanted short sword. It buckled, clutched its gut, collapsed to the floor, and disappeared. He stabbed another one through the face with his dagger, to no effect.