The Night Parade

Twenty-Three

Throughout the city, the human resistance grew stronger. The members of the Night Parade had not been prepared to fight a war. They had been lazy, confident in their abilities. Bellophat’s music had made them drunk with thoughts of their own power. They had never dreamt that the humans’ sheer numbers would prove to be their doom.

Human parents fought like wild animals to save their children’s lives. The rich battled alongside the poor to destroy the nightmare people. The militia rallied the citizens into troops of fighting men and woman. Petty squabbles were put aside as they faced their common enemy. Buildings where the monsters had been trapped were set to the torch without a second thought. The streets filled with people whose fear had caused them to turn away from the day-to-day horrors of life in Calimport, people who refused to allow fear to control their lives any longer.

There were losses, of course. Some members of the Night Parade proved to be vulnerable to steel, and they died as easily as their human prey. Other creatures took a dozen or more human lives before they surrendered to death, while still others could be hacked into a dozen pieces, then rise to escape or slaughter their tormentors.

Despite the high cost of victory, the humans fought and won against the nightmare people. Each time one of the monsters was killed, the humans cheered and howled in triumph. They had no idea that near the docks, a drama was being played out that would decide all their fates.

Myrmeen and Krystin stared in horror from the mouth of the alley as they saw that the temple of Sharess had vanished. In place of the temple stood an edifice that appeared to be in a constant state of transition. Although each of the building’s complex configurations lasted no more than a few seconds, every incarnation bore common aspects:

The support structures were made of searing blue-white energy. Emerald lightning snaked parallel to the ground to create various tiers within the rapidly shifting structure. The building itself had no walls to speak of and was always at least three stories high. Stairways led between the tiers, odd blood-red stretches of linkage that were either too far apart or too close together to easily accommodate humans. Standing before the structure were Lord Sixx and a ring of hooded women in black. In the dark man’s hands was a glowing blue-white object that also reconfigured itself in motions identical to the larger structure. Lord Sixx was sweating, chanting loudly enough to be heard over the rain. The black-robed women chimed in at appropriate moments, adding a chorus to his strangely beautiful song of yearning and loneliness.

Myrmeen realized she was not looking at a building at all. This was the apparatus. The object created a whirlwind of shapes, each configuration more unusual than the last. Suddenly she became aware of the children in the acolytes’ arms. She felt her body shake as revulsion coursed through her. She was witnessing the opening procedures in the ceremony that once had been enacted to metamorphose her sister into the progeny of darkness. She finally understood the true purpose of the apparatus: it was a machine for conjuration, a creation that evoked spells too complex for humans to manage.

Myrmeen did not want to know what the spells would bring into existence. She only knew that somehow she had to stop the ceremony before it reached its conclusion and the infants’ humanity was sacrificed. The beautiful fighter studied the situation as calmly and rationally as she could under the circumstances. Getting to Lord Sixx was her first problem; directly before him lay the structures created by the apparatus, and close behind him was a gathering of monsters, including the flayed man whom Krystin had described, Ord’s murderer. To make her task more difficult, the dark man was wreathed by the circle of robed women. At their backs lay the churning waters of the Shining Sea. From above, the endless daggers of rain created a shimmering curtain that lent a dreamlike quality to the proceedings.

This was not a dream, she reminded herself. People were dying, and if she did not develop a plan quickly, the children born in Calimport this night would become monsters.

“Don’t jump,” a voice called.

Myrmeen felt her heart stop as she spun and stumbled back. Krystin’s movements echoed her own. They both were stunned to see the rain-drenched, swarthy-skinned face of the man they had sent away to find help.

“Reisz,” Myrmeen said as she launched herself at him and threw her arms around his neck. He tensed, placing one hand on her shoulder to hold her back. “What’s wrong?”

Reisz stepped back and proffered a small bundle to them, a child wrapped in blankets. “I didn’t want you to crush the little one.”

Staring in wonder, Myrmeen saw that the baby was asleep. “What happened?”

“My boat capsized while I wasn’t far from shore. I swam back, then fell victim to that strange music. When it ended and I regained my senses, I started to scour the docks looking for you. I’d have missed you completely if not for that flash of light on the roof. I thought of the fire lord and feared you might have engaged him. I hunted until I found you.”

“What about the baby?” Krystin asked.

Reisz hunched over slightly to protect the infant from the rain. “I found a monster carrying the child and had to persuade the thing to part with the little darling—and its life, of course.”

Krystin stood beside Myrmeen, watching the tiny baby’s movements as it slept. Sadness overcame her as she said, “Myrmeen, there is a way for you to get close to Lord Sixx, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

A quarter of an hour later, Myrmeen was walking in the direction of the conclave of monsters. She tried desperately to force back her fear of the creatures, her fear of dying, and her revulsion at her own decision to go along with Krystin’s plan. Although the child she carried in her arms was very light, she strode as if she were weighed down by the burden of a lifetime spent with guilt.

Don’t do it, she thought, don’t give them the child. If you fail, it is a life that might have been spared, and your soul will be plagued for all eternity.

But she knew there was no other way. She steeled herself for her confrontation with the monsters. The heavy winds accompanying the rain licked at the hood she had procured from the creature Reisz had slain and threatened to pull it back and expose her humanity. She had disguised her features by covering her face in the gore of the city’s gutters. The weapons she had looted from a shop two blocks away slapped against her waist and thigh.

Reisz had positioned himself on the rooftop where Tamara had been struck by Zeal’s flames. Krystin had promised to remain in the alley and wait for Myrmeen. If she was killed, Krystin had been made to swear that she would turn and run, never looking back. Reisz was fairly certain that once he performed his task, the night people would not allow him to escape alive. He told Krystin that he would draw them away from her so that she could escape.

“It is my duty as a Harper to die if necessary in the task of protecting others,” Reisz had said. “If you try to take vengeance on the Night Parade, you’ll end up dead, too, and no one will be left to tell the tale. You must get back to Arabel and warn Elyn—she will tell the other Harpers, and they can rally an army to ferret out these killers.”

Krystin solemnly had agreed, then held her mother and kissed Reisz lightly on his cheek, which had been softer and more inviting than she ever would have guessed. She even had made a comment to this effect when she had been left alone with Myrmeen.

Myrmeen had touched the girl’s hair lightly as she said, “My father told me he wanted to make the monsters go away. He didn’t know about the Night Parade. That isn’t what he meant. There are things in our hearts that only we can dispel. If I don’t come back to you, it’s not because I don’t love you. It’s not because I don’t want to come back. This is something I have to do, something I have to try to stop, or the nightmares that I’ve had will seem like pleasant dreams compared to what dreams may come after this night. I pray they don’t come for you, Krystin. You don’t deserve them.”

“Neither did you,” the girl had replied.

Myrmeen had smiled sadly and kissed Krystin’s forehead, then gathered the baby to her and raced from the alley. Now she was yards from the gathering, trying to divorce her thoughts from the horror of what was about to occur.

“Another one,” a bilious creature more smoke and mist than flesh and blood shouted.

The crowd parted to let Myrmeen through. She trained her gaze downward and registered that the baby was awake, squirming madly in her arms, but it was not crying. A strange sucking noise came from the child, competing with the heavy winds, the shouts of Lord Sixx and his acolytes, and the steady drizzle engulfing them. She parted the folds of the soggy blanket obscuring the child and saw two small marks on the infant’s neck.

Her vocal chords, Myrmeen registered in dull, throbbing waves of shock. The child’s vocal chords had been severed or pinched to prevent the little girl from screaming.

I can’t do this, Myrmeen suddenly decided, but then she understood that it was too late, and that she had committed herself. If she tried to turn back now, she would be captured and killed with no chance to redeem the children like the one who now depended on her.

She walked past the gathering of monsters, passing directly before the flayed man. She was about to lay a single boot upon the slight rise where Lord Sixx and the acolytes had gathered when a glob of darkness burned the fabric of reality before her and stretched itself into a perfect replica of the first acolyte.

“She’s hurt,” Myrmeen said. “She may not be worthy—”

“The Draw will heal her,” the acolyte said, reaching out with her pale, withered hands.

You know what to do! Burke’s voice raged in her head. You have no choice. You have to save the children. Go ahead!

Myrmeen lifted the baby slightly and hesitated. Suddenly she felt as if she had been returned to the quarters she had shared with Dak fourteen years ago. She once again was turning away, taking the easy way out: Our child is dead. You don’t want to see. Close your eyes. Close them.

Lifting her head so that the hood fell back slightly, Myrmeen felt her mind suddenly disconnect from her actions. Her face was set with determination as she slipped into the role she had agreed to play and handed the baby over with open eyes and an unfeeling heart. Now it was a matter of timing, skill, precision, and luck.

Lightning struck at the edge of the docks, causing shouts of surprise from the gathering. The new acolyte had turned for just an instant to glance in the direction of the lightning strike. Sixx had squeezed his eyes shut as he chanted. The flash of light made him look out to the dock. Myrmeen knew he would see her face, which was illuminated from the apparatus’s brilliance, when he looked back. Her opening would last for only a second or two.

Thought and action merged as she pulled back the folds of her cape, lifted the twin loaded crossbows that had been tied to her waist sash, and fired both weapons. The first shaft plunged into the cluster of eyes in Lord Sixx’s chest; the second struck the apparatus, knocking it from his hands. The smaller blue-white construct hit the marble at their feet. Its counterpart wavered slightly, the palace of lightning shuddering, then regaining its form and brilliance.

For a moment, Lord Sixx teetered in shock, his words of evocation halted in midsentence. Myrmeen heard a slight whistle of air and prayed that the shaft Reisz had fired from his perch would strike true. She felt a sudden rush of wind at her side and saw a blur of motion as Lord Sixx was thrust out of the way of the shaft and Dymas suddenly appeared with a grunt of agony and surprise, Reisz’s arrow buried in his skull. The flayed man went down, his lifeless body falling upon his master’s wounded form.

“This one dies for your crime,” said the acolyte.

Myrmeen turned to see the old woman to whom she had handed the infant. The woman’s charred black nails suddenly extended into claws that were positioned to descend and tear the infant into bloody ribbons. Before Myrmeen could act, a sword arced through the air and severed the head of the old woman. Myrmeen rushed forward and snatched the baby as the headless body fell.

Krystin stood before her, chest heaving, the sword she had used to kill the acolyte scraping the docks’ wooden surface. She was trembling, covered in blood. Although they knew they were dead, that no one would rescue them from the angry mob of creatures that was just now assimilating the shocking events of the last few moments, Myrmeen and Krystin smiled. A strange, insane look passed between them.

“You really should have been my daughter,” Myrmeen said with a laugh as barren as the giggle of a man being led to the executioner’s blade. “You’re as arrogant and stupid as I ever was.”

“I love you, too, Mom,” Krystin whispered.

Before them, Lord Sixx was being helped to his knees by the remaining acolytes. The woman with the splash of red upon her black cloak had retrieved the apparatus. Another acolyte was dragging away Magistrate Dymas’s body. Myrmeen had no time to react as Lord Sixx produced the edged weapon he had displayed in Pieraccinni’s lair, the one Alden had described to her. He pressed the center gem of three rubies on the jagged blade’s hilt, and the two knives that had been squeezed together sprang apart, revealing a strand of razor-sharp wire that stretched between them.

Myrmeen knew she could not leap out of the way with the baby in her hands. The fighter clutched the child and turned her back on Lord Sixx as he threw the knife. Krystin screamed her mother’s name.

Pain suddenly exploded in Myrmeen’s shoulder. Her left arm went limp, forcing her to hold the baby with one arm. She fell to her knees as she pressed the child to her breasts, determined to shield it with her own body. A single thought raced through her:

Reisz, shoot them! Damn you, Reisz, where are you?

Lightning struck, and from the sudden illumination she saw that the rooftop where he had been perched was empty. From his vantage it must have appeared that Sixx had been struck, and Reisz was scrambling down to help her, not realizing that he had left her to die.

Her entire back was soaked with blood and she quickly became light-headed and dizzy. A moment later it occurred to her that she had not been engulfed by the creatures gathered on the dock. She looked up to see that the monsters had come as close as they could with any degree of safety.

The magic of the apparatus is fatal to them upon contact, Myrmeen thought. Only Sixx and the old woman were safe because they had recited spells of protection against the energies. Dymas had gone to Sixx’s side even when he knew it would mean his death; Reisz’s arrow had been unnecessary.

“Take her,” Myrmeen said, assuming that Krystin was close. The girl appeared before the fighter and took the child from her arms. Myrmeen dragged herself to her feet and turned to confront Lord Sixx.

Behind them, the structures formed by the apparatus suddenly revealed an open center. In that void, a large, rolling cloud of nebulous energy appeared. At the center of the sphere that was forming Myrmeen could see a second round patch of darkness and understood that she was not merely looking at the absence of light, but at entropy, the unraveling of all physical principles known to humanity. The black dot at the ball’s core grew until it resembled a pupil.

An eye, Myrmeen thought in shock. She realized that she was staring at the detached eye of something large enough to dwarf the docks, a creature that looked out with eyes of darkness and absorbed reality in its wake, changing the laws of reason to suit its own desires.

“Lord Sixx, it is time!” the first acolyte screamed.

“No,” he hissed. “This one dies first.”

Myrmeen drew her stolen sword, which she had taken from the shop they had looted, and advanced on the man, her legs nearly giving out with the exertion.

“Not that way,” Lord Sixx said as he yanked her crossbow shaft from the cluster of eyes in his exposed chest. The Eyes of Domination flared. “Watch closely.”

The five remaining eyes on his chest suddenly locked their gazes with Myrmeen’s and changed color. All five suddenly took on the cast of her own eyes—deep blue with golden slivers—and suddenly she was no longer on the docks. The rain had stopped, and her wound had vanished. Darkness surrounded her.

She wondered briefly if she were dead. She knew that it could happen very quickly: an explosion so instant and devastating that she would have no time to become aware of her moment of death. In her mind she ran through a catalogue of other ways in which she could have been dispatched that would explain her presence in this noiseless, formless void.

“What’s happening?” she cried. “Where am I?”

She recalled the eyes of Lord Sixx, the eyes she had seen in a nightmare. Suddenly she understood. He had used those eyes to transport her to another place, a land of the mind. None of this was real.

But how could that be? she wondered. It felt real. It tasted real. The sounds were very real. Music slowly drifted in her direction. Bellophat? No, that was impossible. He had been destroyed, his music stopped forever. She recognized the lullaby, played on a lute, one of her father’s compositions.

“Help me,” a distraught voice called from behind her. She turned, fairly certain that what she would see would be a horror that would inflame her nightmares for years, should she survive this encounter and escape this place.

Her father was there. His body had been pulled apart, stretched to impossible elasticity as it had been in her dream. But this time his face and chest were still intact, while the rest of his body had been ripped to steaming bands of muscle, bone, and bleeding tissue.

“I went there because you were hungry,” he sobbed. “I didn’t want to die. I wouldn’t have if not for you.”

She was not moving. Her legs were not in motion, but she was getting closer to the web. In a sudden, instinctive burst of understanding, she knew that this gibbering creature before her was not her father. It was nothing more than a nightmare Sixx had dredged up from her past. This isn’t real, she thought. Sixx is trying to get at me though my weaknesses, my fears. But I’m tired of being afraid. I’m sick of feeling guilty.

Sixx could shape this place to suit his needs. She understood that if he broke her will here, he would control her forever. And if he murdered her in this place, she would die in the real world. A smile came to her face, because she knew that it also worked both ways.

“I’ve had enough,” she said, pressing her hands together as if she were clutching a sword. Suddenly a long, burning silver shaft sliced itself from the darkness and she felt the weight of her phoenix armor.

/ want to make the monsters go away, a voice from her locked up memories called. Myrmeen identified the voice and realized that what she had told Krystin was wrong; her father had not spoken those words, even though he had loved her very much and would have echoed the sentiment, given the chance. It had been her second husband, the man she had loved until the day he died, though she had not realized that until this very moment. He had been the one to forge this armor. He had given her the strength to wall herself up emotionally until she was ready to deal with the horrors of her past, ready to face her private pain.

Staring at the bastardized image of her father, she knew she had faced it already. She had dredged up all the terrors she had been hiding from, confronted them, and survived. What was before her now was nothing but a lie, an illusion of the mind and the heart.

She had been a victim. All of her life she had blamed herself for tragedies that were beyond her ability to control. She had not sent her father off to be murdered. She had not asked to have her daughter stolen from her.

Myrmeen raised her sword and cleared her mind. She no longer heard either her father’s music or his pitiful wails. The man he had been would never have cried in this way. He would have met his end with dignity. Staring into his eyes, she planted her legs firmly, held the sword parallel to the unseen floor beneath her, and held out her left hand, assuming the first position of defense that the man who had given her the name Lhal had taught her.

The screaming monstrosity racing toward her no longer resembled her father. It had dark hair, a widow’s peak, and eyes covering its entire body. The creature was not a mere construct that Sixx had created to fool her, it was Sixx himself in disguise, terror painted upon his face. He had exerted too much power and could not arrest his flight as he raced toward Myrmeen. As Sixx thundered close, Myrmeen shifted her weight and thrust the sword forward, impaling the screaming figure.

An explosion of blood engulfed her senses, and she suddenly found herself back on the docks, moving in midstride, Lord Sixx’s scream echoing in her ears. The dark man was before her, his many eyes glazing over in shock. Myrmeen stood as if she still held the sword, and Sixx’s chest had been mangled, blood streaming from a terrible wound that had been opened on the psychic landscape. She had no idea if such an injury would have harmed him in this reality—he might have laughed at being impaled—but this wound was different. This one he had suffered within his mind, and even he could not argue with its results. Each of the man’s eyes turned blank as he fell and struck the ground.

Lord Sixx was dead.

“You’re too late!” the first acolyte howled as she held up the apparatus. “You’re—”

She stopped, a stream of blood spewing from her mouth as a sword sliced her heart in two from behind. A gloved hand reached forward and snatched the apparatus from the woman as she sank to her knees, the remaining acolytes mimicking her motions. Myrmeen stumbled forward another step as she saw the laughing, burned face of Reisz Roudabush, his blood-drenched sword in one hand, the apparatus in the other.

A sigh that reminded Myrmeen of the gentle call of a hawk came from the acolytes as each of the children was gently laid on the marble slab. The acolytes then folded themselves into black shapes that shrank to the size of a fist and winked out of existence.

“I took a gamble,” Reisz explained. “These forces didn’t hurt us when we touched Shandower’s gauntlet, so I thought they might be harmless to us now.”

From the charred flesh, the burned clothing that hung on him, and the halting manner in which he moved, Myrmeen knew that the energies gathering behind them were far from harmless to any human. Myrmeen’s attention suddenly was drawn to the sphere gathering in power and intensity behind them, a rolling fireball of arcane energies. The smaller, equally volatile ball of magic that lay within the cage of the apparatus was growing larger in Reisz’s hand.

The old woman had said they were too late. The sacred words had already been spoken. The energies would be released, but without the steady stream of spells the old woman and Lord Sixx were supplying, they would have no focus. Their purpose would be only to consume, or so Myrmeen was willing to wager.

“It never occurred to me that some of these damned things could fly. One of them swooped in and knocked me off the roof after I fired my first arrow,” Reisz said nervously, cutting glances at the shimmering object he held. Desperation tinged his next words. “I never would have abandoned you, Myrmeen.”

“I know that,” she said, certain that the energies from the apparatus in this undistilled form would prove to be poisonous even to humans. Reisz was dead. The last of the Harpers was about to fall.

Suddenly a battle cry came from the crowd of monstrosities that had been forced to wait before the palace of lightning. They were being engaged by human guardsmen. A handsome, dark-haired man appeared before Myrmeen, and she recognized him instantly: Vizier Punjor Djenispool.

She gathered that he had slipped his bonds and run to get help. Hundreds of humans had responded to his plea. His small army fought the creatures of darkness, keeping them well away from the infants near the apparatus.

“We have to take this thing out to sea,” Reisz said. “It’s going to explode—I can feel it—and when it does—”

He decided not to finish. Reisz had no idea what actually would happen if the fireball escaped its cage and sent its energies throughout Calimport. Perhaps a purge would commence, the energies destroying all the creatures of the Night Parade that infested the city. There was an equally reasonable chance that all the humans caught in its wake would perish or be transformed. If the latter occurred, two million new members of the Night Parade would look out to the coming dawn, after the storm had passed.

“It’s not going to be far enough,” Krystin said, holding the voiceless child to her breast. “There isn’t time, can’t you sense it?”

Vibrations rose from the dock. Unchecked, the dark magic of the apparatus was reaching a critical stage. The energies were boiling over, burning away the rain engulfing the city, charging everything within their reach with heat.

Myrmeen glanced at the crying children lying in a circle and felt the greatest sadness for them. Her life had been full, if tortuous at times, and she had made peace with her past. The children would not be given that luxury. A single gallows laugh escaped Myrmeen.

“What’s wrong?” Reisz asked. “What is it?”

“A strange thought,” Myrmeen replied. “I’ve always prided myself on paying all my debts. I swore I would go to my end without owing anyone, but it seems I still owe Pieraccinni a small fortune.”

Reisz’s stricken expression vanished, replaced with an odd glimmer of excitement. Without explanation, he suddenly ran from the marble slab and raced past a collection of monstrosities that darted out of his way, the glowing energies of the apparatus causing them to recoil in fear.

“Reisz, where are you going?” Myrmeen called.

Instants before he vanished down a narrow side street, Myrmeen turned to Krystin and said, “I don’t know what might happen. Protect the children.”

“I will,” Krystin said. Myrmeen turned and only barely heard Krystin’s next words: “I will, Mother.”

The storm engulfed Myrmeen’s senses, and she forced herself on, through the rain, ignoring the lancing pain that came to her with every movement. After several minutes had passed without any sight of Reisz, Myrmeen feared she had lost him.

She ambled forward, Lord Sixx’s blade still trapped in her shoulder. Blood leaked down her back, the sting of rain in her wound causing a throbbing to begin in her head. Myrmeen recognized the area into which she was running, amazed that she had found the strength to move so quickly despite her injury. She wondered if her sister’s blood coursing through her veins was responsible for her sudden strength and dismissed the thought. She knew her true motivation was her resolve to pay Reisz back for the kindness, love, and devotion he had given her so many years earlier. She only wished there was something more she could do for him above being at his side when he passed on.

A flood of creatures emptied into the street before her. They raced past Myrmeen without giving her any notice. She pushed herself to move beyond them and venture into the building that had spewed them into the night: the Gentleman’s Hall. Dragging herself through the main chambers of the establishment, Myrmeen found the door to Pieraccinni’s lair thrown open, the merchant on his knees before Reisz. Pieraccinni was no longer human. He was as Alden had described him: His skin was dark blue, like that of a shark, the smoothness interrupted by bulging red and green veins. He had an oblong head, hooded eyes, and flaps at either side of his neck for air. His body shook as if he had palsy, and she recalled the phrase Alden had used, comparing him to a sea creature under unremitting pressure.

Myrmeen’s offhand comment about Pieraccinni apparently had caused Reisz to think of the night Alden had joined their war. The boy had described the disturbing sight of his employer, Pieraccinni, transforming into a monster. Lucius had suggested that Pieraccinni was a living siphon of magical energy with immense power. Power enough, Reisz obviously had gathered, to absorb the destructive forces emanating from the apparatus.

“Myrmeen, get out of here!” Reisz barked.

“Leave the apparatus and join me,” Myrmeen said. “He can’t get out of this room.”

“I don’t want to take that risk,” Reisz said.

“Reisz,” she pleaded, her voice cracking, “please! Don’t leave me.”

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and bit his lower lip until it bled. Then he turned back to her and said, “Myrmeen, get out before it’s too late.”

At his feet, Pieraccinni babbled incoherently. Myrmeen recalled Alden’s description of what he had seen, and she suddenly understood Reisz’s plan. Pieraccinni’s curse was that he drew magical energy into himself. Lord Sixx had created this room to dampen any arcane power. With those wards removed, magic would come flooding in, overwhelming the man. Reisz hoped that Pieraccinni could take inside himself the apparatus’s magic and spare the city its imminent destruction.

“Reisz, I—”

She stopped. I love you, she wanted to say. She finally wanted to give him the words he had needed to hear, the words he deserved to hear, especially now.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said.

“It’s not a lie.”

He nodded. “And you.”

Suddenly the walls buckled and a long fissure snaked across the roof. Through the crack that had been created Myrmeen saw the rolling fireball that had been contained within the three-story-high cage at the waterfront. It had broken free of its cage and followed the apparatus.

“Myrmeen, run!” Reisz hollered.

She scrambled from the room. Passing through the doorway, Myrmeen hesitated and looked back to see the bloated, quivering body of the arms merchant ripple and become insubstantial. The creature wailed in unimaginable agony as a hole appeared in its chest and grew larger. The gap was filled by a vortex of rapidly changing images: a lake of fire; a dominion of jagged, roughly hewn clouds; a city built entirely on the remains of its dead, bones for supports, skin for covering; and a long desert trail being crossed by hooded creatures taxied in chariots that were alive and screaming under an aqua sky. The abominations were no more repugnant than the ones the Harpers had encountered in Calimport, but they existed in such numbers that as Myrmeen anchored herself in the doorway and stared at the dying creature’s lair, she felt she might be sick with fear.

All paths lead here, a voice called. I am the doorway.

Pieraccinni was not a man—he was not even alive by her standards; he was one of the portals that the Night Parade had used to make the journey to the Realms. To disguise the portal, he had been cloaked in flesh, given a personality and memories, but they were nothing but lies.

Within the portal lay a swirling, chaotic mass of hellish images. Myrmeen saw demons yanking their eyes from their heads and consuming them, colonies of monstrosities waging war against one another, and landscapes where a human being would have burned the moment he touched the ground. Near each of the shifting images were creatures staring at the portal in fascination. Myrmeen wondered how long it would be before one of them decided to reach through the doorway and enter the small room.

Through the fissure in the roof Pieraccinni was able to leech the magic of her world to feed the rift, giving it strength to grow wider. She realized that without Lord Sixx’s dampers in place, the portal would continue to expand until all the magic in the world had been depleted. That meant it could grow large enough to engulf continents, perhaps even the world itself.

“Reisz, we have to close the gateway!” Myrmeen shouted.

The Harper nodded, steeling himself as he hurled the apparatus into the yawning pit before him. Suddenly the lightning cage dissolved, releasing the ball of energy as it shot forward, bursting into one of the shifting tableaus. The portal was engulfed in blinding blue-white energies.

Reisz turned to run from the room when Pieraccinni’s arm shot out, the force of the creature’s will making it corporeal. He grabbed the Harper by the heavy belt at Reisz’s waist and dragged him toward the swelling portal with inhuman force. Before Myrmeen could race to his side, the roof was torn from over their heads as the three-story-high counterpart of the sphere of entropy lowered itself into the room. The fiery, oversized eye was no more than a dozen feet above their heads and closing. Myrmeen watched in horror as Reisz was yanked toward Pieraccinni.

“Give up the quest, Myrmeen,” he called to her. “You’re not going to find what you’re looking for until you do!”

Before she could take a step in his direction, Myrmeen saw Reisz throw his head back and stifle a scream as he was consumed by the portal that had been Pieraccinni. The arcane energies snapped his body apart and ate him alive. All traces of the merchant’s humanity vanished, leaving only the portal and the massive sphere of light that continued to descend, trying to follow its smaller counterpart. Whatever it touched disintegrated instantly.

Tears streaming down her face, Myrmeen pulled herself away and raced from Pieraccinni’s lair. An implosion of sound and light knocked her from her feet and sent her body rocketing across the dining hall. Turning, she picked herself up and saw that the portal and the sphere had connected. The vortex seemed to be consuming the ball of energy, the fiery, magical lace that made up its outer edges straining to weave itself around the sphere.

This was no time for gawking, she reminded herself. Heavy gusts of supernatural winds racked what was left of the Gentleman’s Hall. She ran for the door and in moments she was on the street, stumbling to the ground half a block away. She chanced a look back at the Gentleman’s Hall and saw that the establishment no longer existed. The vortex had grown to encompass the entire building, and the blue-white sphere was now half swallowed up, its lower part emerging in some other world, some nightmare dimension safely away from her own.

The gigantic eye then began to shudder and lose its form. The pressures being exerted by the portal were too much for the sphere. Its pupil spun wildly as if it were searching for a glimpse of the being that had been its undoing. The dark iris stopped for a moment as it fixed its gaze on Myrmeen.

Fear gripped her. She wondered if the sphere really was the eye of the night creatures’ god, as she had imagined earlier. If so, had it seen her? Had it sent an image of her face to its own counterpart in a dimension of undreamt of horror? Would it remember her and seek vengeance?

The street began to shudder, and she scrambled to her feet, prepared to run, but there was no time and nowhere for her to go. The vengeance of the dark god was at hand, it seemed. Suddenly the sphere exploded, spreading a cloud of blue-white energy that resembled shimmering sand released from a shattered hourglass. The energies licked at the sky above Calimport, tinging the heavy rains. Before the unnatural rains could fall, the vortex spread even wider, cutting across an area two blocks in diameter. Buildings were cut in half, their upper portions disintegrating.

The vortex sat there, only five feet over Myrmeen’s head, and she felt as if she were experiencing the worst possible gale winds. She found a post buried deeply in the ground and hung on, even though its upper half had been eaten away by the vortex. Staring up at the wildly changing kaleidoscope of color, Myrmeen felt an intense heat wash over her. The vortex was translucent, and through it she could see the glimmering blue-white raindrops fall to the yawning, hungry void, vanishing as they struck its surface. The portal shuddered as if it had gorged to the point of explosion, but it swallowed the darksome energies released by the sphere anyway. When they were gone, the vortex trembled, as if it was now addicted to the energies of the apparatus.

Myrmeen shook as she watched the vortex. She wondered if it still retained some of Pieraccinni’s mind, or if it operated solely on instinct, need, and lust. The city was rich in magic, and if the vortex still hungered, it might yet attack the city.

Without warning, the vortex shrank with incredible speed and collapsed in on itself. It dwindled until it once again hovered over the remains of the Gentleman’s Hall, then it became too small to see through the heavy rains and vanished. The portal apparently had followed the rest of the apparatus and its power to the dimension where it had sent the mystical object.

Myrmeen began to laugh, and soon her laughter gave way to tears of thanks that were washed away by the storm raging on around her. After a time, she became vaguely aware that people were coming. She hoped they were human. There was no fight left in her. Only the steady, insistent drumming of the rain upon her back kept her from losing consciousness. Soon she felt hands on her back, and she angled her head to see that the men who had found and were helping her to her feet were indeed human.

She stared up at the sky and smiled as she realized that the night had not left them. In the fairy tales her mother had read to her when she was a child, and in the stories that Reisz had recited on the long nights when he had held her in his arms and she had quaked in terror at the storm, the dawn always arrived with the expulsion of evil.

There was no dawn. There would be no perfect day for a very long time.

Myrmeen turned to the faces of the men surrounding her, stunned to recognize the dark-haired nineteen-year-old she first had glimpsed at a table in Arabel. “Ord?” she asked.

He nodded weakly, explaining that he had been wounded but not killed. He was found by the men who had come to help her, a band of adventurers who had several vials of healing potions and felt obliged to pour them all down Ord’s throat when they saw the pin that marked him as a Harper. A cleric was with them, and his magic had completed the task of restoring the young man.

Ord reached to his breast and removed the pin, gesturing for Myrmeen to come closer. “You should be the one to wear this for a time. It’s what my parents would have wanted.”

Myrmeen did not object when he secured the pin to her leathers. She took the young man’s hand as they went out into the rain-swept night to find Krystin.