Prophet of the Dead

2

Aoth reined in his stolen piebald horse and looked for any sign of pursuit. He didn’t see any, just the column of smoke rising from So-Remas’s castle to mingle with the fumes from all the volcanoes that combined to foul the sky. The fire he’d started in the undead wizard’s apartments had evidently spread.

“Nobody was very fond of So-Remas,” said the orc, now clad in plundered clothing and scraps of armor and awkwardly sitting his own stolen white mare. Like most orcs, he’d apparently been infantry, not cavalry, before his fall from grace. “And we left a fair amount of confusion behind us.” He grinned at the memory. “Still, eventually, somebody will likely get on our trail, or at least spread the word that a crazy bandit-wizard and a runaway slave are on the loose.”

A crazy bandit-wizard, Aoth reflected. One of his foremost anxieties on finding himself back in Thay was that everyone would recognize him, but his companion manifestly didn’t. Maybe the tale of the Brotherhood’s invasion hadn’t spread as far as he’d imagined. Maybe those in authority hadn’t allowed it to, considering that the legions wouldn’t come off very well in the telling.

“What’s your name?” he asked the orc.

“Orgurth. Yours?”

“Aoth.” Whether most people hereabouts had heard of him or not, Aoth saw no reason to push his luck by giving his full name, especially since he was already stuck with displaying his distinctive luminous blue eyes and mask of facial tattooing.

“May the Sleepless One strengthen Aoth’s arm and send him worthy enemies to smite,” Orgurth said with a gruff and unexpected courtliness.

“May the Sleepless One sharpen Orgurth’s scimitar and send it worthy heads to cleave,” Aoth replied.

Orgurth’s piggy eyes widened in surprise that his companion knew the correct response. But Aoth had been fighting alongside and against orcs for a hundred years. It was no great marvel that he’d picked up something of their customs.

“Now we’re proper comrades,” he continued, “but maybe only until the point where our paths will split.”

Orgurth tugged at the buckled straps securing a pauldron to his shoulder. Made for a larger warrior, and a human one at that, the armor wasn’t going to fit perfectly no matter how many times he adjusted it. “Why would they?” he asked.

“Because we’re an odd pair. We might attract less attention each traveling alone. And because it’s possible that if a tharchion or someone like that hears my description, the patrols and taxstation guards will become a lot more interested in catching me than you.” Aoth figured he owed the orc that much of the truth.

Orgurth leered. “You must be quite a villain.”

Aoth grinned back. “You’re not the first person to say so. So what’s it going to be?”

“I’ll stick with you. The way I see it, there’s something to be said for going unnoticed, but more for having a partner who can throw lightning into the teeth of those who do take an interest. Where do you think we ought to head?”

“That’s another thing. I have to head for the Citadel. It’s a dangerous choice, but I’m hoping it’s also my quickest way back to Rashemen, and I have urgent business there.”

“That suits me. I’ve had my fill of Thay.”

“It’s settled, then. Let’s put some more distance between us and the castle, then find a spot where we can get off the trail and stop for a while without anybody seeing us.”

“Why, do you need a rest already? I thought the potion fixed you.”

“It did. But I need to talk to my other partner, and I’d just as soon not try to manage a horse at the same time.”

As he drowsed by the crackling campfire, Jet thought that in ordinary circumstances, the tiny portion of scrawny rabbit in his belly would likely only have sharpened his hunger. Yet he wasn’t hungry at all.

Maybe it was because he felt so wretched and weary. Dai Shan had regained consciousness, but like Vandar, Jet hadn’t even dredged up the will to question him yet. He doubted he was capable of listening to the glib Shou’s prattle, sorting his lies from truth.

Or maybe it was because he was dying, and if so, there was a part of him, a part he’d never imagined existed until today, that wished he could just get on with it.

Then a voice spoke inside his head. You’re awake.

Suddenly alert, Jet reached across their psychic link to peer through Aoth’s eyes. The human was sitting on a log in a clearing with an orc and a pair of horses tied to scrub pines. Mountains rose on all sides, some of them volcanoes. Several were smoking and a couple were rumbling and spilling lava down their sides. The snow on the ground was gray with ash.

You’re on the Thaymount, said Jet, as astonished as he was appalled.

Unfortunately, yes. Aoth reached back across their mystical bond, and the familiar felt something else that was new, an impulse to flinch from his rider’s inspection. He wondered if this was the useless human emotion called shame.

Whatever it was, he sensed Aoth’s horror and pity, and that only made the feeling burn hotter. But at least Aoth was matter of fact when he continued speaking:

I was hoping you would fly me out of here. But apparently that couldn’t happen for a while.

I’m sorry.

It’s all right. I’ll find another way north. You concentrate on recovering.

If I can. The statement slipped out seemingly of its own accord, before Jet knew he was going to say it.

Of course you can! You’re stronger than any ordinary griffon. I know. I enchanted you to be that way when you were still in your mother’s womb.

I hope so.

Besides, Cera’s magic will heal you if she’s there. Is she? Jet could feel the anxiety underlying the question.

No. Delivering the bad news felt like another failure. I’d better tell you everything I know about what happened after you passed through the arch into the dark. He did so with a combination of language and flashes of images from his memory.

By the time he finished, Aoth’s worry had warped into anger. And Dai Shan is there with you, right now?

Yes. Jet turned his head so that Aoth could see the Shou through his eyes. Singed, blistered, and stinking of combustion and blood, portions of his garments burned away, Dai Shan looked far different than the dapper emissary to the Iron Lord’s court, but his self-possession remained intact. Apparently engaged in the practice humans called meditation, he sat with legs crossed, palms up, and eyes closed.

Your suspicions were correct, said Aoth. He-or his avatar-tricked Jhesrhi, Cera, and me into going into the shadow maze so he could get rid of us. He tried to murder me, he stranded the others, and maybe he knows how to get them back. You have to question him right away.

Jet found that his own anger gave him the strength to heave his aching body up off the ground. He lunged, shoved Dai Shan onto his back, and held him there by pressing an eagle-clawed forefoot down on his chest.

“Ah,” Dai Shan wheezed, breathless with a griffon’s weight squashing him. “I infer that the fierce prince of the skies wishes to resume the conversation that Captain Bez’s fireball cut short.”

Red spear in hand, Vandar rose heavily. “I guess it’s time.”

“I defer to your judgment,” the merchant said. “Yet I fear the results will prove disappointing. As I was about to explain previously, by chance, I discovered some of the more formidable undead fleeing into a hidden labyrinth. I likewise discerned how to pursue them. I shared the information with Captain Fezim and his friends, and we gave chase. Unfortunately, the creatures realized someone was on their trail and set a trap. In the battle that ensued-”

Jet silenced him by pressing down harder. “Don’t lie. Captain Fezim is here. He’s in my head.”

“Then he must have found a way to return to the mortal plane.” Dai Shan smiled up into the griffon’s eyes. “Congratulations, sagacious warlord. I should have expected nothing less. Yet I’m perplexed. If you’re already in communication with your steed, why does he need to hear the tale of our adventure from me?”

We need to know how you really unlock the magical arches, said Aoth.

Jet relayed the question.

“Of course,” said Dai Shan. “I pray my friends will forgive both my obtuseness and my decision to reserve that information a little while longer. Until the desire for retaliation has lost its primacy.”

Jet pressed harder. “Now.”

“Please consider,” Dai Shan wheezed, “that until we make our way back to the Fortress of the Half-Demon, we won’t have access to any magical arches, anyway. Consider too, that if you kill me, you’ll forfeit the other forms of assistance I can provide.”

“Meaning what?” Vandar asked.

“I have some training in the chirurgeon’s art, even though I’ve always employed it to conduct interrogations not unlike this one rather than to heal. Moreover, when my father told me he was sending me to Rashemen to procure griffons, I learned what I could on that subject. My inquiries included having a sage instruct me on their anatomy.”

Jet realized an instant after the fact that he’d stopped pressing down so hard.

Dai Shan gave him a little nod. “I see the valiant lord of the clouds understands. In the absence of priestly healing, some skilled and knowledgeable soul must set that broken wing. Should that occur, and Tymora smiles, you may eventually fly again. Whereas if it heals as it is, such an outcome is precluded.”

“I want to see you strong and hale,” said Vandar to Jet. “I want to bring Cera and Jhesrhi back too. But how can we trust this dastard?”

“It will be a pity if you can’t, lodge master,” Dai Shan replied. “For I have something to offer you as well.”

Vandar scowled. “What’s that?”

“As Captain Fezim learned and his shrewd familiar now understands, I have the ability to create surrogates for myself. Regrettably, not at the moment. My injuries diminish my mystical capabilities. But when I’m sufficiently recovered, I can conjure such an entity, and it can race to Immilmar more quickly than we three invalids could hope to make the journey. And we need a messenger to go to the Wychlaran and the Iron Lord, do we not, to warn that the most dangerous undead escaped and to denounce Mario Bez.”

What do you think? asked Jet, trying not to let his desperate, selfish hope communicate itself from mind to mind.

Aoth’s answer came with a tinge of bitter frustration, but it also came at once. What choice do we have? Let the little weasel live for now.

Nyevarra led her sisters through the arch with a certain sense of relief. Under Uramar’s tutelage, she’d learned that so long as they knew their route, undead could traverse the deathways without incident more often than not. Yet it was also true that the maze had its perils, and some who entered never emerged.

Glancing around, she found herself in a vault behind a wrought-iron gate. Stone sarcophagi rose from the floor, and cobweb-shrouded jars and urns reposed in niches in the walls. For another moment, the arched doorway opened on the deathways with their crawling, smothering gloom and mad profusion of morbid sculpture. Then the charm of opening ran its course, and space on the other side of the arched doorway wavered into a somewhat more ordinary sort of place, filled with gloom but only the natural kind, and with painted hathran symbols defacing the pentacle mosaic on the floor.

It was the symbols that proved beyond doubt that Nyevarra and her sisters had reached their proper destination. She whispered a cantrip. The lock in the gate made a crunching sound, and, with a squeal, the grille swung open.

Nyevarra and the other durthans swung wide to avoid the pentacle. She had no doubt the sigils would hold their prisoner as they had for centuries, but still, why rouse the demon, especially when stealth was essential? They didn’t want the fiend’s agitation to communicate itself to some sensitive soul in the castle above.

After several turns, a staircase rose to a wall of sandstone blocks. Nyevarra murmured a charm, tapped the barrier with her staff of oak-the antler weapon was too unusual an instrument for someone who wished to be inconspicuous-and, scraping against one another, three loose stones floated free of the matrix. They hovered while the witches clambered through the hole, and then the stones replaced themselves.

Now that Nyevarra and her companions had reached the storerooms, her inhumanly keen hearing could hear drunken male voices roaring out an obscene song somewhere on the ground floor of the citadel. Despite herself, she hesitated, then noticed some of the others doing the same.

“Don’t worry,” she told them-and herself too, she supposed. “This will work. Because the hathrans have no idea that Falconer’s accomplice opened a path for us.”

And it turned out she was right. As she and the others strode through the ground floor of the massive keep, berserkers and lesser folk cleared out of their way and stood respectfully until they passed. Even when they encountered a hathran, the other wise woman simply gave them a casual nod. Aided by enchantment and the natural tendency of folk to see what they expected to see, the masks and voluminous robes of witches concealed the telltale marks of undeath.

The durthans reached the bailey and then the outer gate. It was closed, but the sentries scurried to open it for them, and then Nyevarra beheld Immilmar laid out before her with its ancient, steep-roofed lodge houses rising from the snow and golden firelight shining through the windows. To her surprise, the sight transfixed her and swelled a lump in her throat.

It wasn’t all sacred ground the way the Urlingwood was. But on a more mundane level, it, too, was the heart of Rashemen, the focus of her ambitions, and a place she’d loved ever since she’d first beheld it as a hathran in training. It was also a place that, once it became clear that the durthans’ rebellion was going to fail, she’d believed she’d never see again.

“Are you all right?” one of her sisters asked.

She sighed. “Yes, and we should keep moving. Come on.”

As she led the others through the town, she spied and listened for the signs of ritual. With the wind whistling out of the north, blowing fresh snow from the clouds that mostly obscured the stars, it was a cold night, but still, at one or another of Immilmar’s shrines, there would be witches performing some nocturnal ceremony. There always were.

Before long, she spotted a gleam of yellow fire amid a stand of oaks. The light flickered as figures passed in front of it, walking or dancing around the blaze in a circle. Female voices sang.

Nyevarra raised her hand to halt her comrades. Then they all stood and listened until she’d identified the musical incantation.

When she did, she smiled behind her new leather mask. The hathrans were performing one of the routine rites in honor of the spirits of fertility currently sleeping away the winter like bears. In theory, the ceremony encouraged the entities to wake on time to start the spring.

So Nyevarra and her sisters needn’t worry about disrupting some mighty work of high magic and the potentially explosive consequences that might ensue. That made things simpler.

Still, she spent a while longer crooning her own words of praise and friendship to the spirits of earth, air, flame, and tree the hathrans’ ritual had roused or attracted. She didn’t want them taking the enemy’s side or carrying tales afterward.

For a moment, some of the spirits recoiled from the energies of undeath they felt seething inside her. But they were creatures of magic, and the proper forms placated them. When she was sure they would see what was about to happen as natural and unremarkable, like vines strangling a tree or wolves running down a deer, she motioned the other durthans forward.

The half dozen hathrans had reached a point in the ceremony that required them to take a single solemn step in their circuit around the fire at the end of every line of song. A couple of the mortals glanced at Nyevarra and her sisters as they entered the trees but, seeing nothing amiss, didn’t interrupt the rite with greetings or questions.

Nyevarra suspected she wouldn’t have recognized any of the hathrans even if they hadn’t been masked and hooded. She had, after all, lain dead for decades before Uramar used the magic of the Eminence to call her from her grave. But she was still able to pick out the oldest and thus, in all likelihood, the most powerful. A priestess with a special bond to Selune, the hathran in question had gray hair sticking out over the top of her pale wooden crescent-shaped mask.

Nyevarra waited until the woman’s slow progress around the fire brought her within easy reach. Then she dropped her staff and pounced.

A crescent of pearly phosphorescence glimmered into existence between her prey and her. It looked as insubstantial as mist, but it felt as solid as stone when she slammed into it and rebounded.

Worse, it didn’t disappear after that first impact either. It kept right on floating in the air to protect Selune’s servant. Nyevarra darted to the right in an effort to get around it, but the defense shifted with her.

Meanwhile, the hathran lifted her staff to the night sky and rattled off words of power. Other voices recited other incantations, and one screamed for an instant before something cut the sound off abruptly, but Nyevarra couldn’t look around to see exactly what everyone else was doing. She needed to stay focused on her particular target.

A shaft of pearly light flashed down from the heavens into the hathran’s staff, and her body lit up from within with the same power. She stretched out her other arm, and a beam like a silver sickle slashed from her fingertips.

Nyevarra leaped to the side. The light grazed her shoulder anyway, and though it didn’t cut her like a blade of common steel, pain ripped through the point of contact and a bit of her substance swirled away as mist, without her willing the transformation.

No vampire could suffer such an assault without yearning to strike back, and Nyevarra was no exception. With the moon shield still blocking her and so precluding the use of fang and nail, she clamped down on the urge to hurl lightning or frost. She wanted the hathran alive.

She swayed away from a second sweep of the arc of pale light, dived, grabbed her staff to aid in her spellcasting, and rolled back to her feet. Despite the exigencies of her situation, for an instant, she rejoiced once again in the catlike nimbleness that undeath had bestowed.

She hissed rhyming words in an old Draconic dialect. The moon sword swept low, and she leaped above the stroke without botching her incantation. On the final syllable, she jabbed with the staff as though with a spear.

The glowing shield disappeared.

Instantly, Nyevarra once again discarded her staff, ripped off her mask, and rushed the hathran. Her fangs ached with the need to pierce a vein. Just in time, she realized the mortal was still aglow with white light, and although she considered herself as true a witch as when she was alive, it still might not be prudent to drink in that argent power right along with the human’s blood.

She punched at the hathran’s jaw, and her knuckles cracked the white wooden mask. The mortal witch fell on her rump, and when she lost her concentration, both the pale light inside her and the luminous sickle winked out of existence.

Nyevarra dived on top of the hathran and shoved her down on her back. She tore off the mortal’s mask to expose a plain, square face with finely etched laugh lines, tore aside her cowl too, to finish baring the throat, and then struck like an adder.

For a heartbeat, the hathran struggled. Then she subsided into somnolence, and Nyevarra reveled in the greedy ecstasy of feeding.

It would be so easy to lose oneself and guzzle more and more, especially when the prey had stirred her passions by resisting, indeed, had actually succeeded in wounding her, so she needed blood to stop hurting and recover the full measure of her strength. But she had no idea what else was going on or what danger might even now be preparing to strike at her, and so she forced herself to lift her head and look around.

All was well. Her companions had overwhelmed the lesser hathrans, and apparently without making enough of a stir to alarm anybody else. Nyevarra couldn’t see or hear any sign that anyone was venturing out into the frigid dark to investigate, and she sensed that the assembled fey had watched the fight with a certain curiosity but without caring who won, like men might watch a dogfight.

She looked back down at the priestess of the moon and had to clench herself against the impulse to drink more from the two oozing punctures in her neck. She took a steadying breath, gripped the dazed hathran by her bruised chin, and turned her head so they were looking into one another’s eyes. Then, putting the full force of her will into it, she used her gaze to reinforce the compulsions her bite had already instilled.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Fy … Fyazel,” the hathran whispered.

“And mine is Nyevarra. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Fyazel. And you must be pleased to know me, because I’m your whole world now. You’ll love and obey me like you would the mother of your birth, your mothers in witchcraft, and the Moonmaiden herself. Tell me you understand.”

Fyazel swallowed. “Yes. You’re Mother … and Selune … love and obey …”

“Very good, daughter.” Nyevarra climbed off the fallen mortal. “When the weakness passes, you can stand up. Just don’t be alarmed at anything you see. Everything is exactly as it should be.”

So it was. The other vampires were binding the wills of their own new hathran slaves. Because their ability to walk in the sun made it feasible for them to impersonate living witches for extended periods of time, ghouls stripped corpses of their masked, hooded cloaks and other regalia and used charms to clean and mend the bloody rents. Abandoning solid form, or the illusion of it, a leering ghost streamed and swirled into the body of a woman who babbled prayers for deliverance and thrashed in the grips of her undead captors until the possession was complete.

Nyevarra smiled because here was the true beginning of the conquest of Rashemen. From this modest start, she and her sisters would spread their influence through the Wychlaran, the Iron Lord’s court, and the Urlingwood itself, and when their work was finished, the reign of the durthans would begin. Several decades later than originally planned, but the important thing was that it would last forevermore.

Dai Shan knotted the final strip of torn banner, then cocked his head and contemplated his work.

“Well?” Vandar asked.

“I trust the mighty lodge master-”

“My lodge is dead!”

Pleased that the subtle gibe had scored, Dai Shan bowed. “I beseech your pardon for my clumsy speech. I trust the mighty warrior understands that my formal training didn’t encompass griffons. Still, I see reason for hope that I’ve splinted the wing properly. If adjustments are necessary, perhaps Jet himself can guide my efforts when he awakens.”

His fortitude and pride notwithstanding, Aoth Fezim’s steed had lost consciousness midway through Dai Shan’s ministrations. From the Shou’s perspective, it had come as something of a relief. Jet was no mere beast, yet he could display a beast’s ferocity, and Dai Shan had feared that his painful ministrations might elicit a reflexive snap of the griffon’s beak or a slash of his talons.

“All right.” Vandar used the red spear to gesture to the doorway, and a glint of reflected firelight slid along its gleaming length. “Now show me how to open the hidden maze.”

“Noble chieftain, it will be my honor to help you achieve your purposes as expeditiously as may be. Still, is it wise to wander off and leave Jet unattended, particularly when you and I are likewise hurt and exhausted?”

“We can’t leave Cera and Jhesrhi trapped if there’s a chance of getting them out. Move.”

“As you wish.”

Dai Shan had employed his mystical disciplines to diminish the pain of his burns and bruises. Still, he ached as he and Vandar exited the chamber they’d commandeered and descended into the dungeons underneath the ground floor of the Fortress of the Half-Demon. He took care that neither the discomfort nor the resentment it engendered showed in his carriage or his face. The dignity of a Shou gentleman required nothing less.

The appearance of placid serenity could also cause an adversary to relax his guard, and should that occur, perhaps Dai Shan could spin around and rip away the spear the barbarian held poised at his back.

But no. The moment might come when he could rebuke Vandar’s disrespect as it deserved, but for the moment, it would behoove him to remember that he was the one who was injured and that he might actually need the berserker’s help to survive in this pile and the frozen wilderness beyond.

Vandar found a torch to light their way through the depths. Dai Shan could have seen perfectly well without it. That much shadow magic remained to him even in his depleted state. But why say so? The less the barbarian knew about his capabilities, the better.

After the battle for the fortress, the victors had removed human and stag-man bodies for a mass funeral pyre, but the corpses of hobgoblins, trolls, zombies, and even demons still littered the passageways. Picking his way through the mangled remains, Dai Shan led Vandar to a place where a secondary passage ran away from the primary one. The arch at the start of it had three vertical notches at the top.

To Dai Shan’s surprise, Vandar glowered at their surroundings. For some reason, he recognized the spot, and being here apparently stirred an unpleasant memory. “Open it,” he snapped.

Dai Shan briefly considered misdirection to conceal the actual procedure. After all, the trick had worked on Aoth and his compatriots. But they hadn’t expected that particular kind of treachery. Whereas, after hearing the Thayan’s story as relayed by Jet, Vandar surely was on the lookout for it.

So Dai Shan extended three fingers and made a vertical clawing motion. The act was simplicity itself, but it transformed the space beyond the archway.

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. “What 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.