by Paul S. Kemp
“No?” the halfling asked with raised eyebrows. “Well, I imagine you will in time. Are you going to smoke that or keep holding it hostage under your nose?”
“Huh? Oh.” Jak grinned, struck the tindertwig on the rough leather of his belt pouch, and lit. He took a deep draw. Exquisite.
“Very good,” he said. “Where’s the leaf from?”
“Around here,” the halfling said.
Jak resolved to get some more as soon as possible. Meanwhile, he blew a series of smoke rings as he walked along. His comrade did the same and for a time they held an unspoken competition over who could produce the biggest ring.
Jak lost, but barely. He found that he liked the halfling; he could not help it. Something about the rascal seemed so familiar and yet Jak could not remember his name. He was sure he would in time, just as the halfling had said.
What a strange way to think, he thought.
“Nice around here, isn’t it?” his friend asked.
Jak nodded. “Where are we, anyway? I don’t know this moor.”
“We’re right where we are,” the halfling answered.
“I know that,” Jak replied. He was beginning to think that his comrade was a bit … simple. “I mean, what is this place called?”
The halfling smiled. “It’s called ‘my place’.”
Jak was incredulous and could not keep it from his tone. “All of it? Seems like a lot for one halfling.”
His comrade grinned. “Oh, it’s not for just one.”
“No?”
“No. Look.” The halfling took his pipe from his mouth as they topped a rise. With it, he pointed down into the valley.
Jak followed his comrade’s gesture and saw….
A small cottage. A smoking chimney rose out of a mud-and-thatch roof. The clank of plates and the wonderful, familiar smell that had drawn Jak across the moor floated through the open shutters. So too did laughter. The voices sounded familiar to Jak.
His comrade took a deep breath. “Smells good, doesn’t it? Homey, like.”
“It does,” Jak answered. He inhaled, drank in the smell, and it triggered a sharp memory from his childhood.
“That’s my mother’s potato soup!” he said.
The halfling grinned wide. He tapped the stem of his pipe on his temple.
“It is, Jak. She’s waiting for you. She and your father. Your grandmother too. Even your younger brother Cob. Do you remember him?”
“Remember him? Of course!” Jak could hardly believe his ears. He had not seen any of those people for years, not since they all had …
Not since they all had died.
But that didn’t seem right. How could that be right? And his mother shouldn’t be there either, should she?
As though reading his mind, the halfling said, “A lot happened after you left Misteldale, Jak. Go on. The soup’s going to get cold. This will all make sense soon.”
Jak turned, stopped. “Wait. I feel like I’m leaving something behind, something … undone.”
His friend shook his head and smiled gently. “No. You’ve done all you can. Memories haunt even better than ghosts. Go on, now.”
Jak could not make sense of the halfling’s words but that did not keep him from smiling. “Come with me. My mother loves guests. And the soup is wonderful.”
The halfling in the green hat shook his head gently and replanted the pipe in his mouth.
“I can’t, Jak. Not right now, at least. You go. Go and rest. I’ll come back when I can and we’ll talk then. Well enough?”
“Well enough,” Jak said, and he could not contain a grin. His family! “This is a great place.”
“I am glad you think so,” replied his companion.
Smiling, Jak turned and sprinted down the rise toward the cottage.
From behind, he heard his companion exclaim, “Oh, drat!”
Jak stopped, turned, and looked back up the rise to see the halfling looking forlornly at his pipe. He held it up for Jak to see.
“It’s gone out,” he said, and frowned. “Trickster’s hairy toes!”
For some reason, that oath made Jak smile.
“You like that?” the halfling called down to him. Jak nodded.
The halfling tucked the pipe into his cloak. “I always liked it too. See you soon, Jak.”
Jak gave his friend one more wave, turned, and hurried to the cottage.
CHAPTER 17
CLOSE WORK
Magadon did not have enough mental strength left to raise the barrier behind his friends. He was so weak that he did not even have the strength to stand. He could do nothing but lie there and watch, awed, as the two servants of Mask engaged their enemies.
He was not certain that they were human, not at that moment. Or perhaps his wounds had thickened his mind. Magadon and Cale seemed too fast, too big, too … present to be mere men.
But his mind was clear enough to understand his role. He was to bear witness.
He watched Cale charge into Dolgan with enough force to vibrate the floor. Man and slaad roared into the other’s face. The slaad’s greater weight drove Cale backward, toward Magadon.
The slaad tried to claw at Cale’s sides and back but Cale caught Dolgan’s arms by the wrists and held them away from him. The shadows circling Cale intensified, reflecting his anger.
The slaad snapped his jaws at Cale’s head, missed, then leaped up and drove his legs into Cale’s stomach, rending cloak and flesh. Blood and shadows leaked from Cale, but still he did not buckle.
Still gripping Dolgan by the wrists, Cale spun a half-circle and flung the slaad into the corridor wall with such force that Dolgan’s breath flew from his lungs and his bones cracked. Cale allowed no respite. So many shadows boiled from his skin that he looked ablaze in black fire.
Dolgan barely ducked out of the way of a punch that would have dented a kite shield. Bones crunched when Cale struck the stone wall instead of the slaad, but other than a growl of frustration at the miss, he did not seem to care. The slaad countered with a claw rake at Cale’s throat, but Cale parried it with his forearm and drove a punch with his shattered fist into the slaad’s abdomen. Dolgan staggered backward, bent double, coughing. Cale shook his broken hand at his side and Magadon could see the bones twisting, knitting. After only a few heartbeats, Cale rushed the huge slaad and the two went careening backward, a tangle of fists, claws, shadows, scales, grunts, and shouts. Shadows sheathed them. They fought in a black mist.
Magadon felt that he was watching giants grapple.
The ambient silver light from the tower dimmed. Magadon felt dizzy and feared he was losing consciousness. The corridor fell away. He saw only darkness. A tingle raced through his body, the same feeling he experienced when Cale moved them between worlds.
The darkness partially lifted.
He was sitting on a rocky plane on a small, featureless island set in a black sea under an oppressive, starless sky—the Plane of Shadow. Ochre lightning tore across the sky. Thunder rolled in the distance.
Consciously or unconsciously, Cale had moved the battle to the Plane of Shadow and had inadvertently brought Magadon along.
Ten paces away, Cale and Dolgan continued to roll on the ground.
The sounds of the battle between Cale and Dolgan started out loud, grew faint, and abruptly stopped altogether. Riven spared a glance back at them and saw….
Nothing. They were gone.
“Just us, then,” Azriim said through a mouthful of fangs. “And the dead halfling, of course.”
Riven snarled and rushed the slaad, his sabers wheeling. Azriim parried with his own blade and danced backward out of Riven’s reach. Riven followed, and for a few moments they circled, blades spinning, stabbing, slashing. Riven could see that he was the faster of the two, but the slaad was the stronger. Azriim used his off-hand claw as a second weapon, slashing at Riven’s exposed flesh when opportunity allowed.
The slaad abruptly broke out of the circling and lunged forward, stabbing low with
his blade. Riven parried with one saber while slashing crosswise at the slaad’s throat with the other. Azriim rode Riven’s parry into a spin, ducked beneath the slash, and lashed out with a claw strike at Riven’s chest. The claws tore only cloth as Riven bounded backward.
“Fun, isn’t it?” Azriim asked, and lunged forward again.
Riven did not bother to reply. He would not waste his breath on unnecessary words. The slaad again lunged forward, exposing his lead leg. Riven slid to the side of Azriim’s stab and slashed a blade into the slaad’s thigh. Azriim hissed and countered with a slash of his own that opened the back of Riven’s hand. Pain flared and Riven cursed as his wounded hand lost its grip on his blade. The saber clattered to the floor.
Magadon was fading. He felt thick, saw dimly. He hung doggedly onto consciousness and watched Dolgan disentangle his claws from Cale’s grasp. Flat on his back, the slaad nevertheless unleashed a flurry of claw strikes, opening gashes in Cale’s chest, arms, and face. The slaad tore Cale’s mask off, opening red furrows in his dusky flesh.
Cale parried as best he could with his arms and shoulders and answered with his own punches and elbow jabs to the slaad’s head and throat. Both combatants were bleeding, gasping, shouting, striking. Shadows cloaked them both, swirled around the combat.
With a desperate heave, Dolgan flung Cale off of himself sideways and climbed to his feet. He pulled his teleportation rod and twisted the dials.
Cale rode the throw into a roll, found his own feet, and charged back at the slaad, roaring. He drove his shoulder into Dolgan’s chest, knocked the rod to the ground, and wrapped his arms around the creature. Dolgan tore at the flesh of Cale’s back and bit his shoulder.
Grunting, Cale picked up the slaad bodily. Magadon could not believe what he was seeing; the creature must have weighed a few hundred stones. Cale slammed him down onto the rock. They went down together in a pile of flailing limbs and swirling shadows.
Dolgan drew in his legs and tried to get them under Cale—presumably to disembowel him—but Cale clung tightly to the creature while his hands sought the slaad’s soft spots. Dolgan tore at Cale’s arms and chest. The flesh of Cale’s arms was nearly in ribbons. The slaad chomped down on Cale’s shoulder, near his neck, and blood sprayed. Cale gritted his teeth in pain but ignored the damage. He closed his hands around the slaad’s throat and levered the creature’s head and teeth away from his shoulder. Dolgan’s jaws dripped with Cale’s blood.
Dolgan squirmed in Cale’s grasp, snarled, tried to twist his head enough to bite at Cale’s wrists and hands. Black and red blood pooled around the two.
With his hands firmly around Dolgan’s throat, Cale slammed the slaad’s head into the rocky ground twice—rapidly. Dolgan groaned and his eyes rolled, but only for a moment. He recovered quickly and began again to claw and frenetically shake Cale loose. Cale hung on, his body bouncing atop the slaad, the veins in his arms and brow plainly visible. Cale slid his hands to either side of the slaad’s head. His thumbs crept across the slaad’s face, toward his eyes.
Dolgan’s eyes widened—he sensed his peril. He railed and clawed at Cale with renewed energy, tore great gashes in Cale’s flesh. Cale screamed with pain but refused to release the slaad, though his cloak was saturated with blood. He smacked Dolgan’s head onto the ground twice more.
Dolgan went slack for a heartbeat and Cale’s thumbs found his eye sockets.
Screaming with rage, Cale applied pressure.
Lightning ripped across the sky.
Azriim rushed Riven, trying to force him down the corridor, away from his dropped saber. Riven gave little ground. He gripped his single saber in both hands and parried Azriim’s slash, spun, countered, and gave a slash of his own. The slaad answered and the dance continued. Riven opened several gashes in the slaad’s hide and received a few of his own. Azriim kept up the press, preventing Riven from collecting his blade, but Riven offered enough blows to keep Azriim from kicking the blade farther away.
And Riven had other weapons he could use.
He allowed the slaad to draw in close for another exchange, parried a crosscut designed to open his throat, and maneuvered his face nearly nose to snout with Azriim. Before the slaad could snap at him with his fangs, Riven shouted directly into Azriim’s face the Dark Speech that Mask had taught him.
The word hit the slaad with the force of a war hammer.
Azriim hissed, took a wild swing with his blade, and staggered backward while trying to cover his ears. Riven bounded after him, driving the slaad back a few more paces with a flurry of two-handed slashes. Abruptly, he broke off the attack and retreated to his lost saber. He wedged his boot toe under it and flipped it up to his hand.
He decided then to show the slaad another gift granted him by the Shadowlord. Holding both blades before him, he intoned a prayer to Mask, asking for divine power to fuel his blows. When he completed the prayer, both of his sabers hummed in his hands with unholy energy; both leaked shadow. He advanced on Azriim, who shook his head to clear it of the damage caused by the Dark Speech.
“I did not know we were exchanging repartee,” the slaad said as he parried a series of Riven’s slashes. “I’ve a word or two for you, also.”
With that, the slaad pronounced a word of power and Riven’s world went dark. Azriim’s spell blinded him.
He cursed and backed off several steps, his blades held before him. He tried to picture the corridor in his mind; he thought it perhaps eight paces wide, the slaad four or five paces before him.
“Having trouble with that eye?” Azriim said, laughing, still at a distance.
Dolgan writhed like a mad thing, clawed frantically at Cale’s hands. Desperate, the slaad spoke an arcane word and a clashing rainbow of magic exploded around him and Cale, slamming into both of them, firing in all directions.
The chaotic play of colors made Magadon’s head ache.
The shadows around Cale’s body absorbed the beams that would have hit him, leaving the spell with no visible effect.
Cale gritted his teeth and strained. Veins rose on his arms. He leaned into his work. To Magadon’s astonishment, the slaad’s strength seemed to be no match for Cale.
Cale’s thumbs sank deeper into the slaad’s eye sockets.
“This … is … for … Jak!” Cale snarled.
Dolgan’s eyelids gave way and he screamed as the orbs popped. Pink fluid poured from the sockets. The scream turned into a high-pitched wail of agony. He kicked, flailed.
Cale slammed the slaad’s head against the ground as he drove his thumbs all the way into the creature’s skull, deep into the brain.
Dolgan’s screams became a slobbery gargle, then stopped. Cale rapped the slaad’s bloody head into the stone twice more. The skull cracked and opened. Black blood pooled on the rock.
Cale sat atop the dead slaad, clutching Dolgan’s skull in his bloody hands, breathing hard.
“For Jak,” he said.
He pulled his gore-soaked thumbs from the eye sockets with a wet, sucking sound and stood over his kill. He looked at his bloody hands in surprise, as if they were not his own. Shadows covered him, swirled about him like a cloak in a gale.
Cale knelt and retrieved something from the ground—his mask. He donned it, drew Weaveshear, decapitated the slaad, and held the severed head in his hands. Then he chanted a prayer over Dolgan’s corpse. When he pronounced the final syllable, a column of flame whooshed into being over the slaad, consuming his body. The fire lasted only an instant, but it left nothing but ashes and the smell of burned flesh in its wake. The slaad would not be regenerating.
“Erevis,” Magadon called. His voice was soft but Cale heard him and turned. His eyes glowed yellow through the black, featureless velvet of his mask. The eyes narrowed.
Cale brandished Weaveshear and advanced toward Magadon.
Riven had often fought in total darkness but he did not want the slaad to know that. He put his back to a wall to narrow the field of approach and focused on his he
aring.
Trying to make Azriim incautious, he feigned a stumble, an unassertive wave of his charged blades. Azriim did not take the bait. Riven could not even hear the slaad’s breath. He knew the creature was picking his spot. Riven kept his blades up, ready. He was sweating.
He heard a sizzling sound a fraction of a heartbeat before a bolt of lightning slammed into his chest, melted flesh, and drove him so hard against the wall that several ribs snapped. His breath went out of him and he sank to the floor.
The hallway fell silent. Riven figured the lightning had affected his hearing.
And we could have been such boon companions, Azriim sarcastically projected into his mind.
Riven could not pinpoint the slaad’s location—Azriim’s mental voice originated in Riven’s mind, not from an external direction—so he did the only thing he could. He shouted the Black Speech, filling it with his anger.
To his astonishment, no sound emerged.
The language trick again? Azriim mocked. How very unoriginal.
The slaad must have created a sphere of silence around Riven.
Using his blades to assist himself, he clambered to his feet.
All at once the slaad was on him, grabbing each of Riven’s wrists in a clawed hand and sinking a kick with a clawed foot into Riven’s already shattered chest. Riven’s ribs scraped against each other and his breath went out from him in a silent scream. His sabers fell to the floor soundlessly. His body followed.
Did that hurt? the slaad projected, glee clear in his mental voice. He ground his foot into Riven’s chest, causing the ribs to pierce organs. Agony tore through Riven and he screamed and squirmed in futile silence.
No cursing, Azriim projected, genuine annoyance in his tone. As punishment, I will eat your brain, though I suspect it to be rather bland fare.
Riven struggled to free a hand but Azriim’s grip was stronger. The slaad’s weight on his chest prevented him from moving, nearly prevented him from breathing. Riven knew he was dead. He imagined the slaad’s huge, fang-filled mouth coming for his head.
