In the Empire of Shadow

Chapter Nineteen

Amy had expected something to happen when they were all inside the fortress-the gates to slam shut, or the Shadow-things to surge up and attack poor Sawyer, or lights to spring up, or something-but nothing did. She shuffled on into the blackness, hands out before her to fend off stray furniture, feet sliding along the stone flooring.

“Ted?” she called. “Are you there?”

“Shut up!” Ted answered furiously. “I think I’m waking up! I don’t see anything any more!”

“That’s because it’s dark in here, you idiot!” Pel snapped.

Amy giggled nervously, and glanced back at the huge gateway. It was still wide open; she could only vaguely make out the gates themselves, grayish shapes to either side. Sawyer was clearly outlined against the dimming sky; he was standing there, facing away from her, in a sort of crouch, as if expecting an attack from the stovepipe things.

She couldn’t see anything attacking, though.

“Now what?” she said.

“Damned if I know,” Pel said.

“’Tis an excellent question,” Raven’s voice answered; Amy could see nothing of him in the darkness. She could see Sawyer, and Pel was a shadowy figure to her left, but the others were invisible now.

She could hear footsteps, but couldn’t identify them all-were they all here? Was anyone else here, lurking in the darkness?

She wondered what sort of room they were in; it seemed to be large, judging by the sounds, and since no one had reported bumping into any walls or other impediments. The air was cooler than outside, and seemed a little drier, a little less of a dead weight pressing down on her.

Then she heard rustling-not clothing, but a different, drier sound. Unbidden and unwanted, the thought of rats immediately leapt to mind.

They had seen a few rats along the long walk, but never very close, and never when they were inside, in the dark, in a strange and forbidding place.

“What’s that?” she asked, dropping her voice to a whisper.

Then a light sprang up suddenly, off to her right; Amy started.

“It’s me,” Susan said, holding up a lit match and a twist of paper. She lit the paper, shook out the match, and held up her impromptu torch. “I thought we could use some light.”

“You had matches?” Amy said, astonished. “And you never told anyone?”

“I only had about three left,” Susan replied. “They were in my purse. Valadrakul seemed to do just fine lighting fires, so I figured I’d save them until we really needed them.”

Two or three voices spoke up at once; one of them was Amy, asking, “And you think we need them now?”

“My thanks, mistress,” Valadrakul said. “I’d no stomach to try my magic here in Shadow’s own keep.”

Amy didn’t bother arguing with Susan about it, though it still didn’t seem fair, somehow, that she had had matches and not told anyone. Instead Amy peered around in the darkness, trying to see where they were. The paper was burning quickly, and not casting much useful light; Amy tried to take in as much as she could before it burned away.

They were in a huge chamber of bare stone, fifty or sixty feet wide and at least twice as long, the ceiling invisible in the darkness above-and they weren’t alone. A ledge or balcony ran along either side of the immense room, about ten feet up, and on those two ledges were crouched dozens of vague black shapes, shapes with heads and legs and claws, with eyes and gleaming teeth.

Monsters.

“Are they statues?” Singer asked. The tone of his voice made it clear that he didn’t think so.

“They’re moving,” Pel answered.

“I’m not sure that proves anything here,” Prossie said.

“They aren’t attacking,” Singer said, a bit more hopefully.

Then the flame reached Susan’s fingers, and she dropped her paper torch to the floor; it flared as it fell, then went out on impact.

“’Tis my guess,” Valadrakul said in the renewed darkness, “that Shadow retains these creatures ready here, to be sent hither and yon as the whim strikes it. Were we to be slaughtered, surely ’twould have begun.”

Amy turned, looking for anything that might reassure her, but the only things she could see were the last few sparks dying by Susan’s feet, and the dim gray arch of the entrance. The light outside had died away completely, full night had fallen-and Sawyer seemed to have vanished; she couldn’t see anything of him.

“Now what?” Pel asked.

“We wait,” Raven said.

“What, until morning?” Amy demanded. “No way. I couldn’t stand it. Susan, light another ma…hey!” A thought struck her. “Matches work here? Aren’t they technology?”

“Of a sort,” Pel agreed. “Susan’s gun works, too, remember? But my watch didn’t. Some things do, some things don’t.”

“Blasters don’t,” Singer said bitterly. “If they did, we wouldn’t have any problems.”

“Anti-gravity doesn’t, either,” Prossie added. “Nor telepathy.” When Singer started to object, she corrected herself. “At least, not properly; I can only communicate with telepaths back in the Empire.”

Amy stared at the doorway, wondering what had become of Sawyer. The others all seemed to be here; she had heard Raven and Valadrakul and Pel and Susan and Singer and Prossie…

But Ted hadn’t said anything since he told her to shut up, and she hadn’t seen him when Susan burned her bit of paper.

“Ted?” she called.

No one answered.

“Ted?!” she screamed.

Again, no one answered; the others all fell silent, listening.

Amy could hear rustlings and scratchings from the creatures on the ledges, could hear the breathing of some of her companions, could hear a faint, distant splashing from somewhere out in the marsh-and somewhere, far off toward the interior of the fortress, she heard footsteps, boot leather on stone.

“He’s gone on ahead,” she said. “Into the darkness.”

“Into Shadow,” Raven replied.

* * * *

Pel wasn’t sure why Amy was so certain that Ted had gone on ahead, but it seemed reasonable enough. Ted believed this wasn’t real-or at least, he said he believed it wasn’t real, and acted as if he believed that-which meant that nothing could hurt him. He therefore wasn’t afraid of anything, and he wanted to get it all over with. Why wouldn’t he have gone on ahead?

Pel had been too concerned with his own worries-Nancy and Rachel and his own attempts to get home-to worry much about Ted, but he had decided back at Base One that Ted’s disbelief was a defense mechanism, a way to keep from breaking down completely. Convincing himself that it wasn’t real was a way to avoid going into a state of perpetual panic; Ted had always wanted to be in control of his surroundings, and didn’t deal well with surroundings that didn’t cooperate.

Whether the disbelief was genuine, or just a front Ted put up, Pel wasn’t sure, and it didn’t really matter, because Ted was tough and stubborn enough to act as if he disbelieved no matter what. Pel had proved that to his own satisfaction weeks ago.

Maybe, Pel thought, Ted had decided that whether it was real or not, it was all a story, and he was the hero. Pel could understand that; he’d thought the same way sometimes. If Ted thought of himself as the hero, then he was destined to win out, no matter what.

To Pel, though, Ted looked more like one of those pitiful innocents in a Hollywood movie who gets killed to show the audience just how rotten and nasty the villain is, to show that this is not a game, that there will be blood and death and violence.

“Ted!” he shouted. “Wait!”

“Shut up!” Singer snapped. “Listen, you two, all of you, stop yelling!”

“But…” Amy began.

“We’re standing in this thing’s headquarters, unarmed, in the dark, defenseless, with monsters lined up on either side of us, and you people are yelling,” Singer said angrily. “Do you want to get killed?”

“Think you that Shadow cares?” Raven asked. “What are shouts to it?”

“Noisy, that’s what,” Singer retorted. “Why go out of our way to anger our host? Didn’t we come here peacefully, to ask it to send us home?”

Pel blinked in surprise-not that blinking made any difference, in the darkness.

They had, hadn’t they?

After what had happened to Bill Marks, after seeing Dibbs and the others hanging over the gate, after all the corpses and monsters, Pel had forgotten that it was possible to think of Shadow as anything but the enemy.

“What about Ted?” he asked quietly.

“Let him go,” Singer said. “There’s nothing we can do anyway, is there?”

“True,” Pel reluctantly admitted.

“So what do we do now?” Amy asked.

“We wait,” Raven repeated.

“Or maybe we ask Shadow politely for some light,” Singer suggested. “Or to send us home.”

“You think it can hear us?” Pel asked, peering around into the darkness.

Then, abruptly, before Singer could answer, light blazed; blinded, Pel threw an arm over his eyes. Even through his closed lids, the light that poured around the shielding arm was intensely bright.

Then, gradually, it dimmed, and after a moment Pel risked opening his eyes, arm still raised.

The floor was blue-gray flagstones, joined so well that the seams were almost invisible. His boots, Imperial military issue, were muddy and badly scuffed; the cuffs of his purple uniform pants were frayed and stained. The light was still bright, but bearable.

Cautiously, he raised his eyes and lowered his arm.

Something was glowing overhead-not the ceiling, which was now visible perhaps fifty feet up, but something several feet below the ceiling, something long and straight that ran from the wall above the gate down the length of the room-if it was a room. Pel looked around.

He and most of the others were standing near one end of a chamber that was perhaps fifty feet wide at floor level, but at least sixty by the time it reached the blue-painted ceiling, thanks to the setbacks on either side where the Shadow things stood. However, it was not at all clear whether it was a room or a corridor, because the length was easily a hundred yards, and the far end was not a wall, but a gigantic staircase leading upward.

The walls were pale gray stone, unadorned-granite, Pel guessed. The floor was blue-gray flagstone, unbroken by rugs, carpets, rushes, or any sort of inlay or decoration. The ceiling was hard to make out beyond the glowing rod, or beam, or whatever it was, but it appeared to be plaster, painted the color of the sky in a baroque fresco, that warm, rich blue that made such a fine background for cherubs and chiffon-draped nudes.

Pel couldn’t see any cavorting nymphs here, though-just blank blue. The whole place had a rather barren, unfinished look to it. The intense color of the ceiling didn’t seem to go very well with the natural gray of the walls.

The light source was an utter mystery; Pel had never seen anything remotely like it. It was as if there were an invisible tube full of glowing gas running the length of the chamber, then vanishing into that immense stairway.

Ted Deranian was more than halfway to the stairs, Pel saw; everyone else was clustered near the door.

Everyone else human, anyway-there were all those creatures on the ledges, too. Some looked almost normal-panthers and apes-while others were tentacular horrors, or just things that Pel couldn’t describe. They ranged from the size of a cat-assuming there weren’t others he couldn’t see that were even smaller-up to a gigantic creature near the gate that could only be called a dragon, so large that it appeared to have some difficulty squeezing onto the ledge.

All of them, even in the brilliant white light, were black. Some were flat grayish black, some were glossy black, but all were black, except for eyes, claws, and teeth. Even the dragon was shiny black, from its pointed snout to its snakelike tail, its taloned feet to its batlike wingtips, scales glistening darkly.

And as Pel watched, the dragon moved.

All of the Shadow creatures looked alive, all of them seemed to be breathing, their eyes open and alert, but the others were motionless-or at least staying where they were; a few twitched or shuddered, a few heads turned, claws shifted slightly.

The dragon, though, was stretching its foreclaws and wings, and black horny claws rasped loudly against stone.

Everyone turned at the sound; Pel saw that Raven was rubbing his eyes and waving his head, as if still blind from the flash, while Singer and Amy were blinking. The others seemed to be okay as they turned to look up at the dragon.

It stretched its neck out over the edge of its ledge and peered down at the humans below; Pel could look directly into its greenish-gold eyes, could see the odd frill, or tendrils, or whatever it was that dangled from the monster’s chin, and the hard ridges above the eyes.

Then it slithered down from the ledge.

Singer made a dash for the doorway, but the dragon was faster; the soldier stopped dead only a foot or so from its flank as it interposed itself between the humans and their only exit.

“Damn,” Singer said, as he backed away. It was the first word any of them had spoken since the flash.

“Now what?” Prossie asked.

The dragon hissed, but made no threatening moves; it simply sat there, between the humans and the door.

“I think,” Pel said slowly, “that this is just another version of those slug things-making sure we can’t turn back.”

“But Sawyer’s outside,” Singer objected.

“I suppose he was right,” Pel said. “Shadow didn’t care about him-but it wants the rest of us.”

“So what do we do?” Amy asked.

Pel shrugged. “We go on,” he said. “At least now we can see where we’re going.”

* * * *

Amy’s feet hurt-but then, they had hurt for days now. A year ago, she would have said she could never walk two hundred miles, not if she had all the time in the world and her life depended on it, and especially not when she felt so heavy and tired all the time, whether it was from the gravity here or because she was pregnant. She would have said she could never walk so far.

But now she had done it, and as a direct result, her feet ached. It seemed unfair that even after reaching this stupid fortress, she still had to walk farther. Why wasn’t Shadow right there at the front door, waiting for them?

It was probably trying to impress or intimidate them, making them walk down this ridiculous huge room lined with monsters; she didn’t see what other possible use such a place could have.

Amy had no intention of being impressed or intimidated, though; she thought the room was ugly, was nothing in comparison to, say, the main hall at Union Station in Washington, even if it was a lot longer. And they’d seen plenty of monsters already-the stovepipe things, and the giant bat, and the others they had fought at the spaceship, and the ones that had attacked them back at Stormcrack the first time they saw Faerie. She wasn’t particularly surprised by more of them.

At least this time they weren’t trying to kill her.

That dragon, though, was crowding them.

It didn’t actually push anyone, but as they moved forward, it moved along with them, its talons scratching on the stone floor like fingernails on a blackboard, and it wouldn’t retreat-if they tried to turn back it stopped and stood there watching them, lashing its tail like an angry cat’s, or like a snake squirming, blocking them. If someone tried to go around it it would lunge, and scamper, and cut off whoever it was that had tried to escape.

Singer and Raven had tried to split up and go around both ends, which was when the party had learned that the dragon’s tail was prehensile, capable of tripping a man and then picking him up, and also when they had discovered that the dragon’s full, extended length was at least fifty feet-it could stretch itself across the entire width of the hall.

It was also amazingly fast.

Amy hadn’t tried to turn back; for one thing, that would mean abandoning Ted, who had vanished up the stairs. She trudged on.

At the foot of the steps, however, she stopped and stared upward, dismayed.

The climb had to be a hundred feet-a ten-story building and then some. That bar of light ran right through the center, though she couldn’t see any sort of projector. Someone was sitting at the top, with the ragged remains of a bandage on his head-Ted, waiting for them.

It looked as if he had to wait; the stairs seemed to end at a wall.

It didn’t make any sense; this was a completely stupid way to arrange a building, she thought. Why weren’t there any side-passages? Why did everyone have to go up these stairs? How did anyone get into the rest of the fortress?

It was absurd-but it was here, and very solid and real, and she didn’t seem to have much of a choice. She sighed, and started climbing.

* * * *

The dragon was asleep at the foot of the stairs, curled up like a gigantic cat; as Pel mounted the last few steps he looked down past the light-beam at it, bitterly certain that if any of them tried to go back down the creature would awaken instantly.

He wondered what had happened to Sawyer; had the slug-things gotten him, or had he found a way past, or was he still standing out there, waiting, slowly starving to death?

Of course, Pel felt as if he wasn’t all that far from starvation himself. Singer’s canteen and Raven’s waterbag, stolen three days before from a farmhouse on the road, kept thirst under control, but none of them had eaten a bite since their rather meager breakfast of assorted berries that morning.

Less than a day without food, that was nothing, he tried to tell himself, but his stomach disagreed.

You’d think, he told himself, that he’d be used to it by now. He hadn’t eaten properly for weeks. Back home he’d always taken food for granted-oh, let’s eat Chinese tonight, let’s grab a burger, what about a pizza.

He thought that right now he would be ready to strangle a man with his bare hands if it would get him a decent meal.

Maybe Shadow would feed them eventually-or maybe it would starve them all to death here atop the stairs.

Pel had no intention of starving-if that began to look like a real possibility, he’d go back down and let the dragon make a meal of him, or maybe jump into the light-beam-Valadrakul had warned them all, in his archaic phrasing and barbaric accent, that it would fry anyone who touched it, cook them instantly, that it was basically the same sort of magical zap that he had used against the monsters back at the spaceship, but, in the wizard’s phrase, writ large.

No one had cared to test the wizard’s claim; they had all stayed well clear as they passed it.

Being above the light made everything on this upper part of the climb look strange-faces were lit from below, so the nostrils stood out, as if they were all in a low-budget horror film. The stairs were shadowed, making it harder to climb if one looked down. And the space at the top of the stairs was almost dark.

Pel mounted the final step and stopped.

It wasn’t completely dark here, by any means; they could all see the wall, with its ornate door, just a few feet away, on the other side of the landing at the top.

The door wasn’t anything like the gate below, which was easily at least fifteen feet high and ten feet wide, but this door was still big-maybe ten feet high and five feet wide, Pel guessed. It was red decorated with gold, rather like decor in a Chinese restaurant-Pel wished he could stop associating things with food.

Ted was sitting cross-legged on the bare stone floor in front of the door, waiting; the others were standing along the top of the stair, or just now coming up. Poor Amy was the last; she was panting. This was nothing a woman in her condition should be doing, Pel thought angrily.

He was panting, too, he realized.

Tired, hungry, thirsty, virtually unarmed-they were in great shape to confront the all-powerful Shadow.

If, of course, they were going to. If they weren’t going to just sit here and starve. If they weren’t going to wander on through some interminable maze. If they weren’t all going to be killed instantly-after all, if Shadow could create that light-beam…

How had he ever got into this? Pel reached down to give Amy a hand up the last three steps, and tried to figure that out.

He hadn’t gone anywhere or done anything stupid. He’d just been down in his own basement, minding his own business, when this all began happening around him.

And now his wife was dead, his daughter was dead, Elani and Grummetty and Alella were dead, all those Imperials had died for nothing.

When this was over, they’d probably all be dead.

Why was he still going on? What good did it do? Why had he bothered to come this far?

Heroes did this sort of thing in the books he read and in the movies he watched, they fought on against impossible odds as their friends died around them, until at last they defeated evil and saved the world-but he was no hero. He wasn’t going to save any worlds. He was just going to die.

Well, everybody dies eventually. He might as well get it over with.

He turned to face the door just as it opened.