City of Hawks

Chapter 21

Snuffdark, the blackness after twilight, lay upon Shadowrealm as a lightless mantle of oppression. Even the folk of shadow were subject to the totality. Its strongest were near-blind, weak with the inky darkness that oppressed the plane.

In this grim midnight Gord walked alone over a landscape that moved sluggishly and with convulsive writhings. Snuffdark’s black wind howled as a dirge, and even the fearsome beasts of Shadowrealm cowered in their dens, seeking solace in deep lair or high, awaiting the return of dusk to their somber world.

Not so the black-clad young adventurer now named Count of Twilight. He strode through the pitch dark with sureness of step and firm purpose, a short-bladed sword clenched fast in his right hand. Upon the pommel of this weapon was a phosphorescent jewel, a fire opal with a strange, greenish glow in its core. By its power Gord saw, and the magical sight was clear and strong. Shadowking himself had given him the talisman, for the lord of shadows no longer had need of the gem. He had the tenfold might of Shadowfire.

Imprimus. Gloam of greatest evil, vampiric master of a fell coven. Imprimus, lich among gloams. It was this terrible gloam whom Gord sought amidst the storm of Snuffdark. Somewhere within the wilderness of the writhing plane Imprimus lurked in a secret stronghold, awaiting his moment. The foul being would settle for a sundering of the Shadowrealm, a dual direction. He and his evil circle would use their malign powers to force schizophrenia upon Shadow-king, a permanent division of mind so as to enable them to govern the plane half of the time. Gord knew that such an occurrence would turn the place toward darker and darker ends. The mind of its monarch would erode, and at some point, as the evil within Shadowrealm grew, make the tortured brain weak and vulnerable. Then would come the final assault, and Imprimus would be Lord of Shadows… le roi est mort, vive le roi noir!

Gord stood alone between Imprimus and his ultimate desire, but at best the gloam just suspected the fact. Now, during the deepness of Snuffdark, all of Shadowrealm was at its lowest energy level, and Imprimus was weak and mentally blind.

As he moved purposefully across the weird terrain, Gord sought for certain signs that would indicate the presence of the gloam-lich called Imprimus. In this land of darkness, now smothered by so great a gloom as to defy description, the young adventurer looked for a blackness of blacknesses, a greater and more terrible darkness than any that grasped Shadowrealm. Such intensity of black was the key to where the gloam lurked, for Imprimus’ own evil gathered the pitchy stuff of Snuffdark to it as a lodestone draws iron.

The green tongue of luminescence within the heart of the fire-opal talisman lent luminosity to Gord’s own eyes, and had any been about in the impenetrable murk of Snuffdark they could have observed this weird for themselves. But no shadow-creature stirred, and so Gord strode through the blackness alone, unobserved. Only the hollow moaning of the life-sapping black wind accompanied him as he sought his foe. Then the monotonous, empty sound changed.

“Hoo, hoo, hoooo…” the relentless wind seemed to call. It was a sound somewhere in the lowest audible register, a groaning bellow halfway between a laugh and a lamentation. “Hoo, hoo, ohoooo!” This time the ebon air carried the sound more strongly and with spine-chilling effect. It was no trick of the wind, but the call of some creature abroad in the suffocation of Snuffdark!

When the mournful cry sounded yet a third time, stronger still, Gord blinked and dampened his visual power. Now the young adventurer could see but a bowshot’s distance through the swirling eddies of inky blackness, as if he were an arctic wayfarer peering through the swirling snows of a blizzard. Vision opened, then diminished, as Snuffdark’s winds drove Shadowrealm into frenzied movement and tenebrous stuff swirled and drifted across the landscape.

A crunching sound came, carried by the black wind. The noise was the sound of something crushing the very substance of the shadow-plane beneath it as it came. Monstrous claws compressing the stuff of the place, crushing and crumbling it to atoms by the sheer mass of its colossal form. “Hoooo, hooooo, oohoooo!” came again now, as loud as if the sound were coming from within Gord himself.

Only one thing could be so huge, one creature sound so fearsome a call. The duskdrake was hunting for Gord, even as Gord hunted for Imprimus. No other monster of shadow could abide the Snuffdark, none but the duskdrake was so large. Knowing that flight was useless, Gord resigned himself to facing the oncoming beast. Better to die fighting than to be caught from behind and devoured as a hound snaps up a hare.

The sooty swirling lessened, revealing a jagged mass of shadowstuff a hundred yards distant. Gord couldn’t recall a spire of stone there a minute ago, yet now he clearly saw a great mass of jagged rocks. Then the tall spire crowning the crag split to reveal a cavelike opening, and from this deep hole came a rush of vapors that carried a fell call: “Ohoo, oohooo, ooooah!” The duskdrake had sighted its prey.

Shadow-ground trembled under Gord’s feet as the mighty monster trod upon the land, each step covering a dozen yards, flattening whatever it impacted with. “Futter you!” Gord shouted defiantly. The shadows roiled and flattened around the monstrous beast-a reaction to Gord’s words? Evidently the dusk-drake understood human speech.

Powerful as it was, the duskdrake was not immune to the effects of Snuffdark. The heavy darkness slowed the thing. Its angular neck moved forward and downward, parallel to the ground. It walked ponderously, as if the gigantic beast were moving to the rhythms of a stately gavotte played in courtly half-time. As the hyperdragon moved it issued a ferocious growling, a rumbling that began in its belly and thundered upward, exiting along with a steaming hiss through its massive maw. With the terrible sound came a stream of shadow-fire.

The dim flames issuing from its mouth were not at all similar to the fiery heart of the great black opal. The hissing gout of burning heat was gray and as transparent as a crystal of smoky quartz, although it was shot through with near-black tongues and had tips of diamondlike brilliance. The belching shadow-fire shot across the swarthy stuff of the plane, devouring all in its path, leaving shadow-rock superheated to a smoking dun, washing over the place where Gord had stood defiantly a split-second before. Gord had thought the shadowdragon’s breath fearsome, but now he knew the true meaning of the word.

The young thief’s lightninglike reflexes weren’t enough to save him. Despite- the sluggishness enforced upon the duskdrake by the weight of Snuff-dark, the monstrous beast was still fast to react. The edge of the spewing shadow-flames caught Gord, and the searing heat burned his exposed flesh with agonizing ferocity. At last Gord knew how terrible was the stuff of shadow-fire, understanding the refinement that resulted in the fabulous fire-ruin that had been used by human mages to devastate an empire.

Even as his nerves sent screaming messages of pain to one part of his mind, he managed to act. The hyperdragon’s awful breath had seared him, but in the process the flames had burned and melted so much of the stuff of shadow that a turbidity was created, a thick cloud of cloaking blackness within blackness, through which neither duskdrake nor man could see.

Gord lay at the edge of this concealing mass, and as the monstrous foe stomped and hissed inside the cloud, he ministered to his bums. For whatever reason, the fellow who had first greeted him by name in the Chiaroscuro Palace had later bestowed upon him a small box of salve. Head cocked to one side, birdlike, bright eyes assessing Gord in friendly fashion, this strange man had simply handed the container to him. “Here, Gord. My present to you for your coming quest. You’ll need, I fear, much more, but this is all I can offer.” When Gord had inquired as to the contents of the box, the man told him it was sovereign for all manner of cuts, bruises, and similarly painful injuries.

The ointment proved efficacious for burns, as he had hoped. Gord smeared it heavily on his burned face, blackened arms, charred hands. The balm brought both surcease from the agony and miraculous healing even as the hyperdragon ground a zigzag path through the obscuring cloud. “Hissoohh, hissaaahrr!” the duskdrake seemed to pant as it slammed its two massive feet onto the ground, mighty tail lashing, long reptilian neck swiveling and snaking this way and that as it searched the turbid terrain for its minuscule foe.

As Gord’s burned flesh healed under the soothing layer of salve, the great beast grew more and more angry at its inability to find and finish the puny human who had abused it. In frustration it lashed forth its neck, jaws distended in fury as the shadow-fire it breathed immolated the land indiscriminately. In his location close to and nearly under the duskdrake’s massive tail, Gord was spared a further bath of the incinerating flames.

The tree-trunk-thick appendage rippled and lashed, snaking over Gord’s head where he lay in the shelter of a little hollow, then whipping away to sweep the shadow-ground to the far side. When this happened, the young adventurer leaped up and dashed straight toward the sound of the hyperdragon’s clawed feet crushing all beneath their burden as the monster marched ahead searching for him.

“Whherre aahhrrr yooo hhhiiiding, sssmaahl hhaarre?” The thing could speak, and it was now calmer too. As Gord approached the gigantic pillars that served to hold its body above the ground as the duskdrake moved about, he saw them flex and strain. The broad belly and chest of the beast was being lowered, and the hyperdragon was stooped so as to allow its smaller forelimbs to scrabble through the rocks and dirt exposed by its scorching breath. It was searching for him, Gord realized, using foot-long fore-talons to toss aside boulders as if they were pebbles.

The murk created by the monster’s Initial gout of shadow-fire was subsiding around both man and duskdrake, while all round the region before the monster the air was roiling with fresh clouds from the second, more prolonged bath of awful fire it had received from the duskdrake’s maw. The huge hyper-dragon was even now turning its tremendous body clockwise, searching with eyes and talons too, its hot belly thundering as its internal organs worked to produce the material for yet another wash of the searing flames that were its most effective weapon.

When Gord had suffered the flaming attack of the beast’s fiery breath, the gem set into the pommel of his sword had grown brighter as the licking tongues of gray played over him. The change had not gone unnoticed by the young adventurer, and now, as he stood near the underbelly of the duskdrake, Gord saw that the green within the heart of the fire opal was deeper, brighter, more active than it had been before. If his rapid evasion had been partially responsible for his avoiding the worst of the destruction breathed by the beast, and the ointment had cured the injury done by the fire, perhaps this dweomered gem, the talisman of Shadowking, had done its part as well. Surely the stone was more vivid now, and the faint silvery sheen of his blade showed long arcs of green playing from pommel to crossguard as he raised the sword to strike.

“Oooohh hhooo!” the duskdrake boomed as its snaking head swiveled and one lambent eye, a flat disc the size of a round shield, caught sight of the glowing stone and flashing electricity it generated. Even as the monster voiced its happy surprise, and one mighty limb jerked up in order that it could stamp downward upon him, Gord struck.

“Ah ha!” he countered, unable to think of anything else to say as the blade sunk between the massive, angular plates of the hyperdragon’s belly armor. These thick scales of sooty black were as spiky and hard as those of glistening jet that covered the huge beast’s sides and uppermost parts. Here along its underside, however, the scales were longer, more platelike, and the joints between were broader to allow its underside to flex and curl.

Hot pink played amidst the verdant arcs as Gord used both arms to drive the sword between two of the duskdrake’s banded scales. Even the skin beneath these steel-like plates was tough, as thick and hard as the skin of the largest rhinoceros. It required every ounce of strength he possessed, the coordination of legs, back, shoulders, arms, and wrists too, for Gord to force the keen point home. Legs straightened, back rippled, arms pistoned, wrists locked as human muscle and bone pushed the green-lighted blade of the sword home, until its full length was buried to the hilt within the furnace-heat of the beast’s gut.

“Ahhrrrooo!” The scream that the duskdrake vented when the bar of metal sunk into its vitals was deafening. “Haaarrrg!!” it bellowed louder still, as the green of the fire opal’s heart flared and burned, consuming the gem, shooting up the metal of the sword’s hilt and quillons in a fiery, iridescent display that ate upward along the length of the weapon, a burning so fierce that the hide and scales of the hyperdragon turned translucent beneath the internal glare of it.

Fortunately for him, Gord had been kicked away a dozen yards by the convulsive movement of the dusk-drake’s taloned foot as the beast reacted to the awful pain within its body. The horny spikes covering the thing slashed and tore the young adventurer’s flesh, the force of the blow bruised and stunned him. Nevertheless, the terrible punishment he suffered also saved Cord’s life, for it drove him away from the monster and its final throes.

The agony of the thrust caused the first great twitching, but then the worse torture of the burning within itself drove the hyperdragon mad with pain. It snapped its jaws and spat tongues of its gray fire skyward as its talons tore solid stone and its body beat the ground so as to turn it into pulverized dust and flying shards of rock. Then, green incandescence met gray flame. The two raged and combined, and the whole of the duskdrake’s innards became molten, glowing with an ugly ocher hue as the fires intermixed and consumed the beast.

Gord was up and running, heedless of wounds, enduring the pain of activity. He knew that it was a matter of life and death that he get away as quickly as he could manage. Without the talisman he had no extraordinary visual powers during the total gloom of Snuffdark, but the furnace within the convulsed body of the duskdrake provided ample illumination for the young adventurer.

By the hellish ocher light of the incandescent hyperdragon, Gord sped away, twisting and turning to avoid obstacles as he went. Then he stopped dead. Before him was his own sword stuck point down in the shadow-ground. In its throes, perhaps the dusk-drake had plucked the blade out and hurled it, hoping to thus free itself of the fiery green agony. The opal was gone but the short sword unharmed. He picked it up and turned as he heard a roaring sound from behind.

A rubine star shot forth bloody beams, spears of light that thickened and grew more intense instant by instant. Heat washed over his back, and as the wave of radiation struck, Gord dived headfirst to the hard stuff of shadow-ground. There came a deep, sustained booming, a sound like thunder, as the inferno of opaline fire and dragon flame devoured the dusk-drake and all that was around the beast. A massive shock wave ran through the land, and then everything was again black.

With great effort Gord climbed to his feet and stood, dazed and shaky but alive. Where the titanic duskdrake had been there was nothing to be seen. Close inspection enabled Gord to discover a great crater. Talisman and hyperdragon both were gone. He now faced the pitch blackness of Snuffdark with no magical aids save his sword and long dirk. Did he still have the means to discover the greater blackness of Imprimus’ hiding place? It seemed that the sacrifice of the duskdrake, unintended though it had been, had served the allies of the evil monster well. Gord, their sworn foe, might now be unable to find the lair in which they secluded themselves. Gord slumped in dejection.

Time now to apply more of the salve to heal his new hurts. He needed time too to consider what his next step would be. The grim wind of the Twilight death howled around him, reminding Gord that Snuffdark had by no means run its full course. Yet, even as long as the inky obscurement would persist before the Shadowrealm was again restored to its weird half-light, the interval seemed insufficient to serve. When shadows again slid and swayed across the plane, the power of the gloams would return, and the fate of Shadowking and his realm would be sealed.

Perhaps there was a slender hope left. His sword’s enchantment might serve. That, and his ring whose stone had seemingly picked up some of the green fire from the talisman, together might possibly do it. Having nothing to lose from the attempt, Gord shifted his short sword to his left hand and in a minute he stood peering into the blackness. Gord’s eyes stared blindly into the pitchy world, unable to penetrate the mantling of Snuffdark.

Then, slowly, little by little, his vision began to see variations in the blackness. Here was a darkness the color of coal, there a line of duller shade. Then Gord’s vision grew better still, and deep gray and shining ebony were distinguishable with visual ability that saw not but mere feet but outward by yards. Carefully, Gord resumed his hunt, searching for the enemy, Imprimus, in that place where Shadowking had told him was the most probable locale of the malign gloam’s lair. There were both time and opportunity after all.

The sudden onslaught of the duskdrake had been more than coincidence, that was certain. The terrible beast’s finding Gord in the total gloom of Snuffdark was likewise more than mere chance. The massive hyperdragon had been in the area for some reason, and the most likely one Gord could imagine was to serve as guardian for its ally, Imprimus, during the latter’s time of virtual powerlessness. If this theory was correct, then soon his enchanted vision should alert him to that fact. There would be darkness palpable, blackness more intense than any around, for such stuff gathered around the gloam as he lay in torpid repose during the interval of lightlessness.

“Hail, prince!” The coughing roar that conveyed this salutation was familiar. Was there a bit of sarcastic mirth in the greeting? It was hard to tell. Certainly Hotbreath’s eyes and bearing showed nothing but respect.

“May your pride always be well-fed,” Gord called back in formal response, “How came you here in this vile time?”

“With difficulty, but we too learned from Shadow-king where the nest of enemies is likely to be buried. I have come with some of my own pride, and Smoke-mane too is nearby, accompanied by his females. We are here to serve you once more.”

“Because…?”

“Because it is the will of our Allking. What other reason could there be?”

“What other reason is needed?” Gord shrugged in retort. At the best of times, big male cats make for uneasy feeling, even in alliance, for whatever reason. “I seek the den of the gloam-lich and his pack now, Hotbreath. Gather your pride members and follow.” Without watching to see if the great shadow-lion complied, Gord walked on, intent upon what lay before him.

The deep-chested roar of a male lion came suddenly from ahead. Gord set his body into motion, a bounding run that ate up the intervening distance between him and the location of the roar. There was the bulk of Smokemane, with a handful of large lionesses nearby. The massive male had his head thrown back and was voicing yet a second mighty roar when Gord came springing into the place where the lion stood. “Why do you send forth your challenge?” he demanded.

“I scent the evil reek of gloams,” Smokemane answered in deep growls of most ferocious sort. “I announce my intention to seek out such prey to any who would join me in the hunt.”

“Now I am come,” Gord said to him and his females. “I will lead the way, and you and yours will follow with Hotbreath and his mates. In what comes, Imprimus is mine alone. All others are yours-for any who care to set their fangs and sink their claws. Remember in the stalking and chase that the killing of that one, the gloam-lich, Imprimus, is for none other than me.”

“As you order, lord, but let us stop this speaking and seek the prey!”

Feline noses led them to the place where powerful illusions masked the entrance to the gloam’s hidden place of safely. The way was barred by a massive slab of shadow-steel. Not even the claws of the huge lions could penetrate such stuff, but Gord’s enchanted dagger could. The long-bladed poniard was in the young thief’s hand immediately, its magical metal cutting away the hard steel as a whittling knife slivers oak. The flat surface was broken by a rivet-held box that contained the locking mechanism of the portal. It was certain that the door would be barred inside as well, but first he must remove the initial closure. The dagger’s edge pared the steel away, sending metallic curls falling furiously, and then the box’s face fell away, and the lock was exposed. Next came the thick cylinders of the rivets. They were cut through, driven loose. The lock’s inner plate clanged on the floor beyond, and Gord had a square hole he could reach through.

“I have it!” he cried as his groping found a heavy rectangle of metal on the inner side of the portal. Gord pushed upward, and the bar moved, then fell with a louder clanging to join the steel plate already lying on the stone flags beyond. Gord then tried to shove the heavy door inward, but the thing moved not. “Wait,” he told the impatient lions. “The gate is held by more than a single bar.”

It was difficult, but by straining Gord was able to reach down and locate a second piece of steel securing the door at its bottom. This time he was careful to hold the slab of steel, maneuvering the heavy rectangle so that it leaned upright against the portal it had barred. “Now, one last bit of work, and we should be free to pursue our foe!” The lower bar became a lever for the one Gord had been sure was above. Fortunately, the lockplate had been low on the door and the bars that held it fast were long. The tool served well, and with considerable effort Gord managed to employ it to free the uppermost fastening.

There was a third great clangor, then a fourth as the young thief discarded the bar he had held. When he shoved on the portal this time, the sheet of steel swung smoothly open on well-greased hinges.

“The eclipse of Mool and all the luminaries accompanying it above nears its conclusion, prince,” the huge lion named Smokemane growled to Gord as the young adventurer paused before the open entrance. “You must hasten if we are to take these enemies at their ebb!”

At that urging, Gord moved, stalking into the deeper darkness of Imprimus’ lair, followed by ten lions and lionesses. The hallway beyond the steel portal was wide and went straight into the low hill, angling downward rather steeply as it went. The man and his company of big cats had proceeded some distance, going mostly by touch and an innate sense that enabled them to move within the total gloom, when the floor beneath them collapsed.