Where a single passageway had extended to the limits of one’s vision, it now forked, while walls that were formerly smooth and featureless sported a wild profusion of sculpted funeral processions, wreaths, skulls, and other images of mourning and mortality. The darkness itself seemed thicker and, even to a master of shadows, subtly unquiet and malign, like the petals of a carnivorous plant waiting to close on prey. For all his dour toughness, Vandar sucked in a breath at the transformation.
Dai Shan made a second clawing motion, and the tunnel reverted. “You see?” he asked. “I promised to tend the griffon, and I did. I pledged to teach you how to unlock the undead’s hidden paths, and now I’ve done that as well. So dare I hope that the fearless champion is coming to trust me? After all, we have far more reason to join forces and seek bloody vengeance on Mario Bez than to harbor grudges against one another.”
Vandar sneered. “Open up the maze again and show me where you abandoned Cera and Jhesrhi. Then maybe I’ll start trusting you.”
Dai Shan turned his hands up. “Would that I could. But it wasn’t really I who led the ladies, Aoth, and the fey through the arch. It was one of my shadows, lamentably acting on its own initiative and with a shadow’s ruthlessness, and as soon as it entered what I take to be the peculiar demiplane before us, I lost my psychic connection to it.”
Vandar slashed at the air, and the undead’s branching tunnel reappeared. “Then we’re just going to have to hunt for the place. You keep leading the way.”
“With the utmost admiration for your zeal to aid the sunlady and the fire wizard, may I remind you once again that Jet is alone, unconscious—”
“Go!”
Dai Shan bowed slightly and headed for the arch. The air on the other side was cold and stale, and the darkness leeched the brightness from Vandar’s torch until it burned scarcely brighter than an ember.
The gloom smothered sound as well. When Vandar shouted the names of Cera and Jhesrhi, his voice seemed feeble, and the echoes died quickly despite all the stone.
The undead’s tunnels were a somber chaos of sandstone, granite, basalt, and marble, of sarcophagi inside tombs inside greater vaults. Even the most open spaces, graveyards full of worn, leaning headstones and black lakes where moored long-ships awaited lifeless passengers and the touch of a cleric’s torch, lay under arched ceilings instead of open sky.
The maze ran on and on too, branching constantly, until it came to feel impossible and vaguely nauseating that anything so seemingly artificial, so excavated, built, and sculpted, could be so vast. Finally, Dai Shan turned and, as expected, found the red spear still pointed at his torso.
“It would be prudent to turn back,” he said.
“No,” Vandar replied.
“I trust the stalwart warrior realizes how deeply I respect his devotion to his comrades. Still, we’ve found no trace of them, and your torch has burned halfway down. As it stands, we’ll need a modicum of luck to make it back to the mortal world before it dies.”
The Rashemi’s square jaw clenched. “We don’t have to make it all the way back to where we started. We saw other arches and doorways with the three scratches.”
“Which could lead anywhere. As we’ve learned, one of them stranded Captain Fezim in High Thay, and they could deposit us someplace even less convenient. I respectfully urge the valiant swordsman to think.” For once in his ignorant, brutish life.
Vandar scowled. “All right. We’ll go back for now. But I’m not giving up.”
“I never imagined you would.”
Toward the end of the trek back, Vandar’s guttering torch shed scarcely any light. At its dimmest moments, it brought no more sense to the world than the spots and swirls a man saw when he closed his eyes and pressed on the lids.
It was at such a moment that Dai Shan sensed something trailing them back in the murk where the torchlight didn’t reach. The thing was moving so silently that even Vandar’s sharp ears evidently didn’t hear it, but Dai Shan’s hard-earned kinship to darkness enabled him to detect it like a spider feeling vibration in its web.
He turned and found the annoying crimson spear still ready to spit him. “Far be it from a simple merchant,” he said, “to teach a veteran warrior his craft. Yet you might want to point that implement in the opposite direction.”
Vandar glared, but then something in Dai Shan’s voice or manner must have convinced him he ought to pay heed. He pivoted, Dai Shan stepped up beside him, and they faced the blackness together. Yet even so, their stalker nearly took them by surprise.
One moment, Dai Shan sensed it lurking beyond the torchlight. The next, it was gone, replaced by a feeling of pouncing, hurtling motion—a sensation that made no sense whatsoever, considering that no form remained to be in motion.
It took a critical instant, but then Dai Shan realized what he was perceiving. The stalker was translating itself from one patch of darkness to the next. It was magic he could perform himself when he was up to it, but he hadn’t had occasion to observe it from the outside since his youthful training with the shadow masters.
Even as a boy, he hadn’t needed his teachers to explain how to use the spell to best advantage. It had been immediately apparent to him that only a dunce would leap in front of his foes when he could spring in behind them instead.
Dai Shan spun back around to find that the stalker was indeed behind him. Its black shape was a writhing, lashing confusion in the gloom. It could have been a huge, misshapen beetle standing on its hind legs, or perhaps a giant centipede rearing up like a serpent.
Whatever its true form, if it even possessed one, it snatched with several jointed limbs simultaneously. One hooked Vandar’s neck and jerked him flailing backward.
Meanwhile, Dai Shan dodged one such attack, brushed aside another, and stopped a third by catching the skinny limb in his hands. As he started to snap it in two, the contact seared him like the touch of cold metal, and when he completed the action, the sections of broken leg stuck to his fingers. He lashed his arms and flung them loose but lost skin in the process.
More limbs reached for him. He blocked or evaded them as well, but they kept him on the defensive and held him away from the creature’s body. He rattled off words of command that would have cowed any shadow entity he’d raised up himself but had no effect on the murky thing before him.
Something on the floor made a strangled grunt of effort. He looked down and saw that the stalker had pulled Vandar off his feet, hooked him with several of its limbs, and was dragging him forward. His face a mask of fury, the Rashemi struggled to break free but, even berserk, couldn’t manage it.
Dai Shan stamped on the shadow’s limbs, breaking them. The effort made it more difficult to defend against attacks directed at himself, and after another moment, one such snagged his thigh, and the curved claw at the end of the stalker’s arm caught in his flesh. Dai Shan reached to yank it out, and a different thin, articulated limb hooked his wrist.
At the same instant, Vandar bellowed and surged up off the floor. With all the momentum of its brawny, lunging wielder behind it, the red spear plunged through the whipping, snatching, raking limbs to pierce the murky form from which they emanated.
The stalker floundered backward, for an instant, dragging Dai Shan with it. Then, however, it let him go, even the claw caught in the meat of his thigh somehow slipping free.
Or maybe it melted away because the creature was no longer in front of its human foes. Perhaps Vandar’s spear thrust had destroyed it utterly, or perhaps it had vanished to safety in the same way it had leaped in to attack.
Once he was satisfied that the shadow beast was really gone, Vandar panted and leaned on his spear. For a few moments at least, he’d be weak and sick now that the battle fury had run its course.
The Rashemi’s manifest vulnerability made Dai Shan reconsider disposing of him. But nothing fundamental had changed, so the Shou retrieved the fallen torch instead and offered it to his companion.
Vandar grunted. “Wh
at was that thing?”
“Some manner of shadow, but unfortunately, one unresponsive to my particular art. The entities I command are animate darkness first and foremost. Our attacker had too much of death—or undeath—in its essence.”
The berserker mulled that over in what was no doubt a futile attempt to understand. Then he said, “You saved my life.”
“If I’m not mistaken, we saved each other’s, and why would we not? In our present circumstances, survival is our first concern.”
“No,” Vandar said, scowling. “Finding Cera and Jhesrhi is our first concern. That, and killing Mario Bez. Help me do those things, and I’ll let you survive.”
Dai Shan had heard offers of truce couched in more amiable terms. But he took it as a positive sign that as they resumed their trek, Vandar no longer held the red spear poised for a thrust at his spine.
A thunderstorm was blowing in from the west, and the first flickers of lightning, rumbles of thunder, and cold drops of rain were making the novices uneasy. Each of the little girls was supposed to be trying to commune with the spirit residing in a tree of her choice, but their focus was manifestly wavering as first one and then another glanced around at the shelter the row of lean-tos would afford. Finally, plump, apple-cheeked little Hulmith, who was always the most willful, started in that direction.
“Stop,” Yhelbruna said.
Hulmith froze. Willful she might be, but all the girls were at least a little in awe of their new teacher, the hundred-year-old hathran who figured in so many tales and rumors.
“Why are you giving up on the exercise?” Yhelbruna asked. “Are you afraid of getting wet?”
Hulmith hesitated. “I don’t want to get hit by lightning.”
A couple of the other girls nodded.
“You won’t,” Yhelbruna said, “not here.” She waved her hand in a gesture meant to encompass not just the clearing but the Urlingwood in its entirety. “This is the most sacred earth in all Rashemen. It protects us as we protect it. And to be worthy protectors, you must learn to rejoice in Nature in all its aspects. Everyone, come out from under the branches and lift your faces to the sky. Welcome the storm just as you offered your friendship to the souls of the trees.”
The girls obeyed. Some, however, did so with a trudging reluctance that irked Yhelbruna. She reminded herself that so long as she was young in body, she didn’t want to turn into a grumpy, impatient old crone in spirit, even though she occasionally found the pretense useful.
“Cheer up,” she coaxed, removing her brown leather mask. “This isn’t a punishment. If you give yourself over to it, it will lift up your hearts.”
Certainly, it had always lifted up hers. All her life, she’d loved the cleansing tumult of a storm, and as the lightning flared and the hammering rain stung her upturned face, she felt the old familiar exultation. It gratified her to peek around and see the same joy flowering in the faces of her charges.
Then the clearing blazed white and thunder boomed at the exact same instant. Dazzled, blinking, Yhelbruna saw Hulmith collapse in a steaming heap.
For an instant, she simply gaped at the sheer impossibility of what had just happened while the other girls goggled in horror. Then she started toward Hulmith and her students fled screaming toward the lean-tos.
As if the frantic scrambling had provoked the storm to further malice, more thunderbolts flared down from the clouds. Blasted, more girls burned and fell.
Yhelbruna raised her staff high and cried out to the spirits of the earth, trees, and air. Like much of a hathran’s magic, the spell blended prayer and subtle coercion into a spell capable of calming any entity a witch was likely to encounter within the borders of the holy forest.
But this time, it didn’t work. Raging and hateful, the fey to whom she spoke spurned her flattery and defied her commands with a vehemence that made her head throb. A numbing tingle surged up her legs.
With a gasp, she sat up in her bed. Twisted and tangled, her blankets lay on the floor, and she was cold. But cold was better than lightning-struck, or standing over the bodies of lightning-struck children, and she sighed and slumped to realize the ordeal had only been a nightmare.
Then something boomed, and the heart jolting in her chest, she jumped.
Scowling, she pulled on her mask, rose, moved to the window, and opened the shutters. Wings extended, red and yellow flags flapping, the Storm of Vengeance was flying in from the north. After another moment, one of the enchanted ballistae on its deck hurled a thunderbolt flashing and banging across the blue morning sky.
Mario Bez and his sellswords hadn’t raised such a commotion on the previous occasions when they’d flown into Immilmar. It was a display they’d likely reserved to proclaim themselves victorious.
Yhelbruna felt a twinge of regret. Although her office required impartiality, in her secret heart, she’d hoped Vandar would beat out Bez and his other rivals in the competition for the wild griffons.
But the thing that truly mattered was if someone had ended the threat the undead posed to Rashemen. So, laying her personal feelings aside, she dressed quickly, gripped her staff, and then took a moment to settle dignity and reserve about her like an extra cloak. With that accomplished, she left the whitewashed longhouse that was the Witches’ Hall.
She wasn’t the only one braving the early morning chill. Dozens of curious folk were heading for the spot on the lakeshore where the sellswords customarily set down. Their feet crunched in the snow, and their breath steamed, reminding Yhelbruna momentarily of Hulmith’s body smoking in the dream.
Maybe conversation would distract her from such unpleasant images. She cast around and found Fyazel tramping toward the frozen lake. For some reason, the priestess of Selûne was wearing a different mask than usual, a full moon instead of a crescent, but after long years of acquaintanceship, Yhelbruna had no difficulty recognizing her from the way she carried herself.
“Good morning, Sister,” she said.
Fyazel turned. The brown eyes behind the white wooden mask blinked twice, almost as if she didn’t recognize the woman who’d addressed her.
“Are you all right?” Yhelbruna asked.
Fyazel’s eyes narrowed and appeared to focus. “Fine! It’s just that I was up all night communing with the Moonmaiden. Now I have this racket waking me with the dawn.”
They walked on together until they spied brawny, bearded Mangan Uruk striding along with his iron circlet on his head and a number of his warriors hurrying to keep up with him. It might have better befitted the dignity of the Iron Lord to wait for Bez to come to him, but curiosity had evidently superseded protocol.
With a trace of amusement, Yhelbruna realized the same could be said of her. She was likewise an important personage, yet she too, had proved too eager to learn what was happening to stand on ceremony.
She and Fyazel joined the Iron Lord’s party as was their due, and he and the other warriors bowed to them. Then they all continued onward and reached the frozen lake just in time to see the Storm of Vengeance float to earth. The wings folded against the hull as the crewmen cranked the windlasses, while other sellswords worked on deck to lower the sails.
A rope ladder tumbled over the side of the skyship. Mario Bez swarmed down it as nimbly as a squirrel. A middle-aged man who wore his graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, he had a strong, shrewd face marred by a bumpy beak of a nose. As usual, he’d dressed in the red and yellow that were his company colors and armed himself with a rapier and main gauche. The blades were enchanted; they were not only weapons but tools for conjuring as well.
Bez bowed low with a sweeping flourish of his arms that he’d likely learned in some southern court. “Majesty,” he said. “High Lady. I come with good news and a trophy or two as well.”
He waved to the ship. Some of his men lowered sacks on ropes. Others clambered down the ladder to catch the bags and carry them forward.
“If I may?” he asked, and when the Iron Lord inclined his head, the sellswords dump
ed the contents of the sacks in the snow.
People gasped and flinched, and Yhelbruna understood why. Many of the severed heads were hideous, decayed and deformed, but beyond that, in their plenitude, they radiated a sort of spiritual vileness sufficient to grate on the nerves of even the least sensitive.
Yet the trophies were harmless and inert, dead now in every sense of the word, and she wondered why the sight of them failed to move her to happiness, relief, gratitude, or any emotion Bez might reasonably have expected.
“I could have brought troll and hobgoblin heads too,” the outlander said. “But I figured these were the ones that mattered.”
Yhelbruna supposed they were, indeed. The sellswords had collected the putrescent heads of zombies; the fanged, vaguely canine heads of ghouls; and the naked skulls of animate skeletons, all festering with the lingering residue of undeath. The mercenaries also had the vulturine head of a vrock and the broad, scaly one of a hezrou.
Mangan stooped to inspect the demon heads more closely. It was likely that, despite a lifetime of combat, he’d never seen such entities before. As he straightened up again, he said, “Tell me the tale.”
Bez grinned. “Gladly, Majesty. With the resources at my disposal, I eventually tracked the raiding parties that have been plaguing Rashemen back to their secret stronghold. As it turned out, they’d established themselves in an old castle in the north. I believe your sagas call it the Fortress of the Half-Demon. There, as I mentioned, they were building a genuine army, with goblin-kin and their ilk rallying to their banner. Fortunately, their plans hadn’t progressed so far that the Storm couldn’t put a stop to them, and the creatures won’t bother you again.”
Mangan smiled, sincerely enough but with a hint of rue. “It must have been a glorious battle. I wish I’d been there. Congratulations.” He offered his hand, and Bez shook it.
“I congratulate you as well,” Yhelbruna said. “But why were the undead rising in the first place? What was behind it?”
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