by Paul S. Kemp
The guide stayed a full ten paces ahead, to ensure they’d avoid any pitfalls or other mundane hazards. His knucklebone eyes looked ghostly in Jak’s bluelight. Mud caked all their cloaks and boots. Cale marveled at Magadon’s pack, which was so large it looked as though he was carrying another person on his back. The guide must have been stronger than he appeared.
“We’ll need food soon,” Magadon called back.
Riven and Jak didn’t even raise their heads in response, merely grunted in the affirmative. Cale too signaled his agreement, though he wasn’t hungry. He simply wanted to engage in something ordinary, to take his mind off the plane, to take his mind off himself.
“It’s taking longer than I had hoped to clear the bog,” the guide continued. “So we must start rationing our supplies as of now. No one is to eat or drink anything native to this place unless it becomes absolutely necessary.” He waited for them to catch up. “Let’s inventory our stock. What do each of you have for food and water?”
“A few days of rations,” Cale said. He squeezed the waterskins at his belt and added, “A skin-and-a-half of water.”
He’d carried out of Starmantle only enough rations to get him to the Gulthmere and back. The starsphere and the book he had taken from the Fane of Shadows were the heaviest things in his pack.
“About the same,” Riven said.
Magadon frowned, obviously troubled, and said, “I’ve got more than that, but not much more. We’ll need—”
“Rations are not an issue,” Jak interrupted. “I can conjure food and water with a spell. Anything I want, whenever we’re hungry.”
Magadon’s raised eyebrows indicated both his surprise and pleasure.
“Jak, that’s more useful than you know. I feared we’d have to drink the water here. Even after boiling …” He looked to Cale then continued, “Let’s find a dry spot, make camp, and eat something conjured by our chef.” He grinned at Jak. “With luck, we’ll get out of the bog sometime tomorrow.”
Cale agreed and they did exactly that.
“What do you need for your spell?” Magadon asked Jak, after setting up the two canvas tents he carried in his pack. The guide seemed to carry more in his backpack than would fit in the extradimensional space of a magical bag of holding.
“Just put that pot on the ground,” Jak replied, indicating the large, beaten-metal cooking pot that Magadon carried with his gear. “And our waterskins too.”
They piled the pot and their waterskins on the ground before Jak. The halfling held his holy symbol pendant over the pile and intoned a prayer to the Trickster. The pot filled with a thick, steaming stew. The waterskins swelled to capacity.
Magadon gave an appreciative whistle and said, “There’s many times I could have used you in the bush, Jak.” The guide knelt, dipped a finger into the stew, and tasted it. “Potato,” he said with a smile. “And tasty.”
Riven snorted irritably and glared at the halfling.
“Potato?” he grumbled. “Nine Hells, Fleet. You can make anything you want and you settle on potato stew? What about some meat?”
Jak bristled and pointed his pendant at Riven’s chest.
“My mother made potato stew, Zhent,” said the halfling. “Hot soup warms the soul, she used to say. Probably little help to you, seeing as how you’re a soulless bastard. You’re welcome to your rations, if you’d rather.”
That last statement caused Riven to keep behind his teeth whatever retort he might have been considering. Cale grinned.
Smiling himself, Magadon removed several small, wooden bowls from his pack and used them to start serving the stew.
“Your mother was a wise woman, Jak,” the guide said through his mirth, and gave the halfling the first steaming bowl of stew. “And you’ll have to forgive Drasek for his words.” He winked at the halfling and said, “He had no real mother, of course, being the spawn of ice and molasses. Which explains why he grew up to be cold and thick.”
Cale laughed aloud.
Jak chuckled, eyed Riven with distrust, and said, “Slippery and dark, more like.”
Riven scowled at the halfling, but nevertheless held out his hand for a stew bowl.
“That was a poor jest when you first made it years ago, Mags,” the assassin said.
“Poor?” Magadon asked, and ignored Riven’s outstretched hand in favor of Cale.
Cale sipped the thick soup. It was tasty.
Magadon continued, “That half-orc and his fellows would have pummeled you to gruel. That jest saved your life.”
“Theirs, more likely,” Riven said, and Magadon cocked his head to concede the point.
Jak, continuing to chuckle, said, “Cold and thick. That’s good. Very good.”
“That’s enough, Fleet,” Riven barked, but Cale heard the smile behind the words. “Now give me some of that godsdamned stew, Mags, before I pummel you to gruel.”
The woodsman did, and for a time the camaraderie of the road and the warm food chased the shadows. But only for a time. After the meal, the weight of the plane and the chill of the swamp once again descended.
They huddled around Jak’s bluelight wand saying nothing, suddenly exhausted. Magadon had selected a campsite within a stand of the brooding, cypresslike trees common to the swamp. To Cale, it felt like the trees were watching them, the leaves whispering evil words.
After a time, he said, “I’ll take first watch. All of you, get some sleep.”
The next “day” seemed much like the one before—chilly, wet, and gloomy. They slogged alternately through knee deep, black water, soggy vegetation, and mud that stank like the worst of Selgaunt’s sewers. Wisps of shadowy fog hovered over the land like dark tendrils squeezed from the saturated earth. Uncomfortably, they reminded Cale of the squirming tentacles from the Fane that had effected his transformation into a shade.
A few hours into the day’s trek, Magadon said to them, “The ground is rising and less saturated. We’ll clear the swamp before this day is over. I’d wager on it.”
“You never were a good gambler,” Riven grumbled.
Magadon grinned.
For his part, Cale could see so no end to the bog in sight and felt no change in the ground. It just felt like the same mud. Still, he felt comfortable trusting Magadon’s expertise and he continued to trek on.
Without warning, a wave of terror washed over Cale. His breath caught and he could hear his heart thumping in his ears. Sweat formed on his brow. To judge from the look of wide-eyed alarm on his comrade’s faces, they all felt something similar.
The swamp fell silent around them. Even the ubiquitous flies had vanished.
Cale put his hand to his blade hilt and looked around, his gaze darting from pool, to reeds, to trees. He saw nothing amiss, except that each of his comrades had gone ashen. The feeling of terror lingered.
“What is this?” Magadon asked softly, his voice tense.
The guide unslung his ashwood bow, drew an arrow from his quiver, and scanned the swamp. Pools of black water stood to either side of them, steaming in the humidity. The dark trees of the swamp loomed like watchtowers.
Jak and Riven went back to back and drew their blades. Jak let out a sharp breath that sounded like a hiss. Magadon and Cale too closed ranks. Cale’s hand stayed on his sword hilt but he did not draw. He looked around, but still saw nothing. He listened, but heard only the rapid respiration of his companions. The water around them remained still; too still. A blanket of shadowy mist pooled around their knees.
“There!” said Magadon, pointing his bow to the sky. “Above us.”
Gazes followed the point of the woodsman’s knocked arrow.
Against the backlit sky, one of the clouds, smaller than the others and darker, slowly wheeled a circle. Even as they watched, it veered in their general direction.
“Trickster’s toes,” Jak oathed, squinting. “What is that?”
With his enhanced vision, Cale could see that what they were looking at was not a cloud at all. It was a po
ol of writhing shadows—semi transparent to his transformed eyes. Within it, he saw the source of their magically induced terror.
“Kill the light!” he hissed. “Now.”
Jak could not have missed the urgency in Cale’s voice. Asking no questions, the halfling spoke a word in his own tongue and the wand’s glow ceased.
“We can’t see more than fifteen paces, Cale,” Riven growled, still eyeing the sky.
Cale knew, but their only hope was that the creature in the sky had not noticed them.
“Quiet,” he ordered.
Nearby stood a cluster of thin-leafed, droopy-limbed trees—not the cypresses, but they would be enough to hide them.
“Those trees directly to our right,” Cale said. “Go now. As fast and as quiet as you can.”
They must have heard the alarm in his tone, for they sheathed their weapons and darted off without comment. The splashing water rang like a gong in Cale’s ears. Twice Jak fell in the water, and each time Magadon and Cale pulled him back to his feet. Somehow, Cale seemed faster than usual. He actually had to slow down to not outpace his comrades. As he ran, he prayed to Mask that the huge creature soaring overhead would not notice them. He imagined its dark eyes boring into his back. He looked ahead to the trees, willed them all to run faster, sensed a space between the shadows, and—
—he felt a moment’s disorientation, a transitory rush of air, and—
—he was there!
Cale stood in the copse, well ahead of his comrades. Somehow, he had stepped instantly from one shadow to another, seemingly without passing through the intervening space.
Dark and empty! he thought.
He had no time to consider his newfound ability. He stepped out from under the cover of the tree’s low boughs and beckoned his comrades on.
“Faster,” he hissed.
They had stopped, dumbfounded at his sudden disappearance and reappearance so far in front of them. They again began to run in earnest.
The cloud circled above them, a giant, scaled vulture swathed in shadows. The creature began to descend.
Cale reached for his holy symbol, but realized that he didn’t have one. Instead he put his hand to his blade hilt. He drew it a fingerwidth and hesitated. He had not yet drawn it in on the Plane of Shadow and he felt that to do so somehow would be to surrender something that he could not quite articulate. Reluctantly, he removed his hand.
His comrades, wet and winded, streamed into the copse and ducked under the sheltering boughs. There they waited, ankle deep in the soft earth, stink, and water. The leaves and darkness enshrouded them.
“Quiet,” Cale whispered, then he listened and watched.
He willed the shadows around them to darken slightly and much to his surprise, they did.
Riven, standing beside him, whispered, “Bad?”
Cale nodded. It could not be worse. He looked out of the copse and saw nothing. The tree limbs obscured his vision, but he could not miss the creature should it come near.
Magadon touched the tip of his arrow to his head and it began to hum lightly. He re-knocked it.
“What is it?” the guide asked Cale.
The beat of huge pinions, like the wind that presaged a thunderstorm, drowned out anything Cale might have said in answer. The force of the wings rattled the trees under which they hid, and threw up a blinding mist of swamp water and clots of mud. A huge, sinuous form, still streaming the remnants of the shadows that previously had cloaked it, alit in the water forty paces from the copse and filled Cale’s field of vision. Its body displaced so much water that the copse was flooded up to their knees.
Terror went before it.
Cale held his breath, heart racing. So too did his comrades. All of them stood perfectly still, both awed and terrified.
Jak finally managed a whisper: “Trickster’s hairy toes.”
Cale knew that his comrades probably could barely see the creature through the darkness and the trees. For his part, Cale caught only glimpses of it through the curtain of limbs, but….
Dark and empty, its size!
Its wingspan could have shaded the whole of the Uskevren manse. Lustrous black scales as large as great shields covered its muscled form. When it moved, shadows played along its hide. The edges of its form appeared to merge with the darkness, melding with the shadows of the plane and making it difficult to determine where the actual body of the creature began and ended. In those shadows, Cale thought he saw the dark, shifting images of struggling bodies, of faces contorted in screams, of eyes agog with terror. His skin went gooseflesh. Somewhere in the back of his brain, he heard moans and wails. He pushed them back and focused on the creature. Cale caught a flash of ebon horns, of teeth longer than Jak was tall, and of merciless eyes that reflected no light.
Dragon, his mind registered. A dragon of shadows.
The creature beat its wings once, spraying water in all directions, and sniffed the air. Cale knew that if it caught their scent, they could never outrun it. They could only fight; fight and die.
It lowered its great horned head to the level of the water and moved it from side to side, sniffing, searching. Its respiration sounded louder than a forge bellows. The shadows around it formed writhing bodies and contorted shapes before melding to sheathe the creature in gloom once again.
Cale expected the dragon to roar loud enough to deafen them all, but instead of a roar it spoke, and its sinister voice was the threatening whisper of a drawn sword.
“Lightbringers in my swamp,” it said, still sniffing. Its eyes narrowed. “I smell your sweat. Human sweat.”
Magadon’s mental voice suddenly sounded in Cale’s head, giving him a start.
We’re linked, the guide projected.
Cale nodded. The link was a good idea, but it caused him to feel the fear pulsing along the telepathic channels that joined him to his friends. He tried to keep his own anxiety under control. Panic would not serve them.
It knows we’re nearby, Riven projected softly, crouching silently to peer through the foliage. I can barely see it.
What is in the shadows around it? Jak asked.
Cale did not bother to answer. The dragon itself was terrifying enough.
Jak asked, If it comes, then what?
The halfling held his holy symbol in both hands. He hadn’t bothered to bare his short sword. It was too paltry a weapon against a creature the size of the dragon.
Then we fight, Cale answered, with as much steel in his mental voice as he could muster. There’s nowhere to run.
His comrades said nothing, but each of them shifted slightly. Magadon drew his arrow back another few fingers’ breadth and took aim through the boughs.
The dragon continued to chuff after their scent, peering suspiciously at this or that copse of trees or stand of reeds.
Ready yourselves, Cale projected, though he did not know what any of them could do.
As quiet as a wraith, Riven drew his magical sabers. Cale closed his fist over his sword hilt. Jak edged closer to Cale.
The dragon, incredibly graceful for a creature so enormous, slid through the swamp toward them, sniffing, searching, its swinging tail and powerful forelegs propelling it through the muck. It reared back its long neck and looked in the direction of their copse. The pupils of its deep, violet eyes visibly dilated.
“I can hear your hearts beating,” it said.
The dragon opened its mouth wide. Its inhalation sucked the air from the vicinity of the copse.
Cover! Cale mentally shouted.
But before any of them could move, the dragon expelled from its jaws a cloud of viscous shadows that washed over the copse, and soaked them for a moment in impenetrable darkness. Cale felt its effect immediately—the chill of the void, the pull of negative energy on his soul. Strangely, it seemed to have little effect on him. Jak and Magadon groaned as the dragon’s breath stole some of their essence.
The cloud began to dissipate into greasy streamers, and Cale saw that Riven too seemed lar
gely unaffected. Jak and Magadon, though ashen, remained on their feet and seemed still to have their wits. A rain of shriveled leaves and dry twigs fell from the trees around them.
Magadon’s bow sang.
Jak’s weakened voice rang out with the words of a spellcasting.
Riven lurched from the copse toward the dragon, wading through the water, blades bare and whirling.
The guide’s psionically enhanced arrow hit the dragon in the throat below the hole of its mouth, but shattered harmlessly on its scales. A beam of white light streaked from Jak’s outstretched palm, but the shadows surrounding the creature swallowed whatever effect the beam otherwise would have had.
Surrendering to the inevitable, Cale at last drew his blade and followed after Riven. He almost laughed, so absurd must they have looked, like fleas charging a dog.
From behind him, he heard Jak and Magadon following hard after, splashing through the mud and water. Jak began again to cast.
As Riven plowed through the muck, mud, and vegetation, he began to shout in the foul tongue he sometimes uttered in his sleep. Somehow his voice seemed more powerful, deeper, darker, as though amplified by the shadows. Cale could not fight down the nausea caused by the vile words. He coughed his midday meal into the waters of the swamp. Behind him, Jak and Magadon cried out in pain.
The shadows sheathing the dragon swirled into recognizable human forms, all of them covering their ears, though the dragon itself seemed unaffected by the utterance. As fast as a lightning strike, it lunged forward and clutched Riven in its foreclaw before the assassin could bring his blades to bear. Pinning the human’s arms to his sides, the dragon picked Riven up out of the water and began to squeeze. Forms lurched forward from the shadows around the creature, arms outstretched, as though to embrace the assassin.
Cale could imagine the cracking ribs, the crushed organs. A bloody froth exploded from Riven’s mouth but he continued to struggle to free his blades, all the while shouting in the vile tongue.