Nightblade

by Liane Merciel

  "Completely." Ascaros's steed was ahead of Isiem's; all Isiem could see of his friend was a dark gray cloak crowned by curly black hair. There was a curtness to the shadowcaller's words that made it clear, even past his refusal to slow down, that he did not wish to discuss the subject.

  Isiem didn't care. He spurred his horse alongside Ascaros's. "How do you know?"

  The shadowcaller reined his ebon horse back, casting an acid glance at his friend. "I suppose it's possible that the Beast of the Backar Forest might have digested more than one shadowcaller in its day, true. But even granting the perpetual murders and betrayals among my kin, Sukorya's diamond would be impossible to mistake."

  "What is it?" Isiem asked.

  "A cursed thing, like all their treasures." Ascaros fumbled at the neck of his cloak with a black-gloved hand. After a few seconds, he pulled up a spiked chain of antique make. Among the baubles hanging from the chain was an elaborate egg-shaped case of silver.

  Every inch of its surface was worked into whorls and curlicues evocative of knotted chains and clawlike manacles. Smooth black onyxes and cabochons of smoky quartz dotted its design in the timeless Nidalese fashion. A serrated line along one side of the egg, and tiny hinges on the other, suggested that it could be opened like a locket.

  Ascaros detached the silver case from the chain, palmed it for a moment, and then tossed it at Isiem with a flick of his wrist. "Examine it yourself, if you like. Just close the case before you return it. I don't much like looking at the thing."

  "Is it dangerous?" Isiem peered at the case in his hand. It did not gleam in the leaf-dappled sun. Instead, its dull gray metal absorbed the light, giving nothing back. Up close, its designs were more disturbing than he had initially thought, suggestive of bodies wrenched in torment rather than empty chains. Or perhaps that was only how they appeared now: the lines seemed to move in his peripheral vision, contorting into new patterns the instant they were out of sight.

  "Only if you try to use it. Or look at it too long." Ascaros's horse quickened its step, responding to his mental command rather than any physical cue. The shadowcaller avoided looking at the silver case in Isiem's hands, but he gave his old friend a wry smile as he rode away. "You were always good at resisting those lures, though. I hope the knack hasn't left you."

  Hesitantly, Isiem eased the case's clasp open with his thumb. The metal was oddly cold in his hand. A moment earlier it had felt ordinary against his skin, but a chill seemed to breathe from its heart as he opened it.

  Inside, something sparkled. It was bright—far too bright to be casting back reflected sunshine. Its radiance came from within.

  The wizard cupped his hand around it reflexively, trying to hide the brilliance before it drew his companions' eyes. He wasn't sure why, but somehow it seemed vitally important that no one else see what the case contained. Only after he'd wrapped the case in a fold of his cloak, dimming its light, did it seem safe enough to continue. Cautiously, keeping the case cupped in the thick gray fabric, Isiem pried its lid open completely.

  A diamond shone inside. Easily the size of a quail's egg, it had been cut into a pillowy, soft-cornered cushion that refracted its facets endlessly into a rainbow-laced hall of mirrors. It was flawless, as far as Isiem could see, except for a single dark crystal trapped at its core.

  There was something troubling and hypnotic about that flaw. The crystal was no natural hue: it was scarlet as fresh-spilled blood, and at the same time an utter, lightless black. Color and un-color slid across its surfaces. Sometimes, impossibly, both at once.

  And it was evil, profoundly evil, so much so that gazing into it caused Isiem's jaw to clench and set his teeth to trembling.

  The Nidalese was no stranger to malice. In his time, he had murdered friends and betrayed them. He had spoken to demons and stared into the void from which shadowbeasts came; he had loved a Chelish diabolist and trembled blind before the Black Triune. Only the night before, he'd faced the Beast of the Backar Forest and dug into its corpse.

  But he had never touched evil like what lay within that diamond.

  He closed the case with shaking hands and spurred his horse to catch Ascaros's. Wordlessly, he thrust the silver egg back at the shadowcaller, who took it with a taut, knowing nod. Only after Ascaros had clipped it back onto its chain and dropped the case under his shirt, removing it from view, did Isiem take a full breath again.

  "How can you stand having that next to your skin?" he asked, shuddering.

  "The gifts of my kin," Ascaros replied, lifting one shoulder in a scant shrug. "This is no worse than their others. So, you agree: it's the key to Fiendslair?"

  "I didn't delve that deeply into the stone," Isiem admitted. "I didn't dare. But I fear you are correct. It is the key to Fiendslair."

  Chapter Twelve

  The Valley of Nightmares

  No clear line separated the shadowlands from the ordinary world.

  The change crept up on them slowly, hour by hour, as they rode east out of Molthune. The sky became grayer, bit by bit, as the clouds thickened into a perpetual overcast. Wildflowers grew more sparsely among the creeks and bushes, and those that persisted lost their vivid hues. Red poppies' petals shifted to a faded, tired pink. Sun-yellow dandelions lightened to soft cream. And all of them, in the end, became the same stark white, while the grass around them darkened to shadowy gray.

  The strangeness dampened conversation. No one wanted to speak, anyway. Sound behaved oddly in the shadowlands: a whisper could carry for miles, while a shout might die abruptly in the air. It was eerie enough hearing the steady clop of their horses' hooves distorted; no one wanted to hear their own voices warped. They rode in silence, watching the world's colors drain away.

  Night came early in the shadowlands. When it was too dark to ride safely, Teglias signaled a halt. It was only midafternoon—or it should have been—but days were abbreviated by that cloud-smothered sky, while nights stretched long and cold.

  Isiem and Ganoven conjured ghostly lights to illumine the campsite as the others set about raising tents and watering the pack mules. On a whim, Isiem attempted to make his light emerald-green, but was unsurprised when it manifested as a hazy white instead. The illumination was barely half what it should have been, and the shadows cast by that crippled glow seemed deeper and more menacing, as if the darkness were offended at his temerity in trying to break its grip.

  "There's something wrong with my spell," Ganoven grumbled, eying his wisp of a light.

  "Nothing is wrong with your spell," Isiem said. "The wrongness is in this place."

  "Can it be countered?"

  Isiem shook his head, sending a second floating ball of light to shed its radiance over Copple and Pulcher while they hammered tent stakes into the rocky ground. A third circled around the other side of the tent, aiding Ena as she unpacked their bedrolls. "No more than the shadow over Nidal itself can be. Perhaps less: the shadow recognizes its masters there. Not here."

  "Dimmed light spells don't worry me," the dwarf grunted while hauling armloads of bedrolls into the tent. "If that's the worst the Umbral Basin throws at us, I'll count us lucky. Blessed, even."

  "It won't be," Ascaros said softly. He had dismissed his summoned steed but had not come to join them in the wavering circle of light. Instead, he stood at its periphery, a silhouette against the darker night. One of his hands was poised near his throat, and silver gleamed across his white knuckles: the chain that held the spell-locked case of Sukorya's cursed diamond.

  Teglias cleared his throat. "Should we set a guard?"

  Ascaros's shrug was barely visible, a ripple of fabric in the shadows. "If it soothes you."

  "I'll take first watch," Kyril volunteered immediately. She had just begun to loosen the first buckle on her armor, but she clacked it back into place and straightened. "It's no hardship."

  "I'll take third," Ena said resignedly, "and that is a hardship. But not as bad as the middle watch. So that one's yours." She pointed midway between Pulc
her and Copple, leaving it entirely unclear which of them she meant. The two of them immediately set to quarreling, while the dwarf chortled under her breath and finished unpacking what they'd need for the night.

  The Aspis thugs argued all through their meal of salt fish and barley porridge, resorting to pointed glares and "accidental" shoves when Ganoven ordered them to drop the discussion. They hadn't settled who was taking the middle watch by the time Isiem retired to his bedroll. The sound of their bickering, only barely muffled by his pillow, continued as he dropped into slumber.

  Regardless of whether it was Pulcher or Copple who eventually lost that argument—or whether they just kept arguing until it was time for them to both sit the watch—everyone was still alive when Isiem woke the next morning.

  The day was gray and gloomy, and a constant veil of drizzling rain shrouded them as they gathered their belongings in preparation for venturing deeper into the valley.

  The Umbral Basin was not a deep valley. It was a broad, shallow bowl that sloped down from the feet of the Mindspin Mountains at such a gradual incline that in another place, less obviously cursed, it might have been mistaken for flat land. Opaque gray fog filled that bowl, and even from a distance, it was plain that there was nothing natural about the mist. It was thicker than smoke, immobile as stone. Wind did not touch it, and it lingered long into the morning and then into afternoon, as the weak sun labored above them and they rode steadily toward the fog.

  "I have heard stories of a black storm that rolls through the Umbral Basin and twists reality in its grip," Kyril murmured as they crested another low hill to see the shadow-filled valley below. The blurry suggestions of trees and boulders were barely visible through the fog, more as amorphous patches of deeper gray than as anything their eyes could identify. "Is this it?"

  Isiem shook his head. "The fog's danger is more prosaic. Horses might stumble on unseen stones and break their legs. Traveling companions get separated. It's easy to lose sight of landmarks, or the road, and wander aimlessly in the valley. Then night falls ...and the deadlier dangers come."

  "Does anyone live in there?" Ena stood in her stirrups, pushing back her hood and craning around her shaggy pony's neck as if that would enable her to peer through the fog. "Villages, towns? Any kind of civilization?"

  "Not that I've ever heard," Isiem said. "In Pangolais they teach that no one, not even a shadowcaller, survives in the Umbral Basin for long. Certainly no one would believe that a peasant could survive there. But there are many people who have an interest in hiding from the Umbral Court, and many in the Court who have an interest in keeping dissenters cowed. So it's possible that someone might have tried to eke out a living in the valley, and equally possible that the official histories might choose to assume them dead without any real proof."

  "Would you have done it?" Kyril asked, pushing back her damp hood. Curiosity shone in the half-elf's dark eyes. "When you were desperate to flee Nidal. Would you have tried hiding in the Umbral Basin, if that was the only chance of escape that you had?"

  "No," Isiem said. His hair was beginning to come loose again, so he unknotted the leather thong that held it back and retied it. "I wanted to escape, not die."

  "There are a thousand and ten ways to die in Pangolais," Ascaros agreed quietly, "but very few to leave the Umbral Court's control. If there were any chance of escape through that pass"—the shadowcaller nodded toward the black rift in the mountains ahead—"those rumors would have run through Nidal like wildfire. But no one has ever spoken of the Umbral Basin as anything but doom."

  "Charming," Ena grumbled, eying the paladin as she settled back onto her saddle. She shook raindrops from her cloak with a pronounced shiver. "Doom. I'm glad you asked about that. I feel much better now."

  Ascaros shrugged, fingering the spiked silver chain that trailed down his shirt. "We shouldn't have to spend a full night in the valley. Sukorya's stone will lead us to Fiendslair, and I will open the hidden gate as soon as we find it. We might have to ride into the night, but we won't have to sleep in the Umbral Basin."

  "That's nice," Ena said. "Not that I could sleep here anyway, but I appreciate the thought."

  They rode a little faster after that, but only a little. The mist rose up to their saddles as they descended into the valley, and then up to their necks. The pack mules balked in dismay at entering it, although Ascaros's shadowsteed was undisturbed by the clammy, blinding fog.

  It made for an unnerving journey. Isiem was constantly on edge, certain that he'd just seen some faceless foe creeping toward them, only to realize that it was an illusion created by the swirling movements of the mist.

  He wasn't alone in his unease. All of them rode close together, as if proximity would protect them from whatever might lie unseen in the distance. Pulcher muttered a steady stream of profanity-laced prayers under his breath, and the handle of his hammer never left his ham-sized fists. The fog clung to the lenses of his spectacles no matter how many times he tried to wipe them clean. Copple swiveled to and fro in his saddle, squinting into the fog with fruitless paranoia. Sweat beaded on the short man's doughy brow and, mingling with the drizzling rain, dripped from his coarse black sideburns. Perspiration stood out on his forearms so that the colorful tattoos etched across his skin seemed to be melting.

  But when they finally stumbled across concrete evidence of a menace in the mist, it was not at all what Isiem had expected.

  Directly ahead of them, the fog parted abruptly, as if blown aside by an impalpable wind. The rains, too, ceased. Five blackened shacks stood in a circle on the barren ground. Four of them were barely large enough to hold a man standing upright with his arms at his sides. The fifth, at their center, was twice the size of the others and far better made. Its logs had been arranged in elaborate braidlike patterns, whereas the others looked like giant piles of kindling, thrown together with nails hammered in wherever two pieces of wood chanced to cross. It seemed a minor miracle that any of them stood upright.

  All five were built entirely of warped, sooty black logs, such that Isiem initially assumed they must have been damaged in some great fire.

  When he got within twenty feet, however, he could see that assumption was wrong. The stony earth around the buildings was neither scorched nor littered with cinders; it was the same dull lead gray as the perpetually overcast sky. Colorless grass and near-leafless saplings grew not far away, and they showed no sign of having been burned.

  The logs hadn't been touched by flame. They had been petrified—not just the wood, but the nails that had been hammered into the logs, and even the straw and mud that had been used to caulk the fist-sized gaps within the walls. And whatever had done it had turned them not to drab ordinary stone, but to glossy black obsidian.

  "What magic is this?" Kyril breathed. She dismounted from her horse, tossing its reins back across the animal's neck.

  "None I want to meddle with," Ena replied darkly, crossing her arms. "I'll stay just where I am, thank you. Or better yet, leave."

  Kyril ignored the dwarf. "There's something inside the central building." Pushing her cloak back from her sword arm, she approached cautiously. The fog seemed to respond as she did, creeping closer with every step the half-elf took. Foggy tendrils snaked back through the outer ring of shacks, blurring their burnt black edges. "I don't think it's alive."

  Ena eyed the mist warily, reaching for the crossbow that dangled from a saddle loop just behind her thigh. "Oh, good. Let's run through our options then, shall we? It could be undead. Or a trap. Or demonic, that's always a solid choice. Shadowbeastie of some kind, there's another. Or—"

  "No. It's something else," Kyril interrupted. "Something hanging from the ceiling. Ornaments or talismans of some kind, perhaps." She drew her sword a few inches from its sheath. Its blade shone, in defiance of the cloudy sky, as she called upon her goddess's power. Briefly the half-elf closed her eyes; when she opened them again, it was with a grimace of distaste.

  "Well? What are they?" Ena inquired. "H
ams? Demonic hams?"

  "This is no time for jokes. Wizard, come and look." Kyril waved over her shoulder with a gloved hand. "I sense evil from whatever lies in there, although I can't say what to make of it."

  Isiem approached and peered past the paladin. Sleek black objects, their size and shape vaguely reminiscent of lemons, dangled from twisted ropes hung from the apex of the largest shack's ceiling. They were just visible through the holes in the walls where the warped logs leaned away from each other. Between them, pale knotty ropes drooped in semitranslucent loops around a larger, round object in the center.

  "Can you tell if all of it's evil?" he asked.

  Kyril nodded. "The central building more than the others. Whatever's inside more than the shell. But yes, all of it. All of them." She drew her sword again, fully this time. The steely blade blazed with a halo of blue flame, as it had when she faced the Beast. Its brilliance threw her features into sharp relief, making her seem more a marble statue than a living woman. "Shall I come with you?"

  There was no sense turning down help. "Please."

  Together, they walked toward the ring of black buildings. The earth was strangely dry here, despite the ever-present fog and the recent rain. It crunched underfoot, breaking apart into brittle fragments of cracked mud. A ten-foot circle of empty ground surrounded the shacks where the gray-hued grass and feeble saplings could not, or would not, grow.

  Each of the shacks had a narrow opening in its walls, just large enough for a man to squeeze through if he turned himself sideways, that faced the central hut. A fist-sized hole punctured the center of each shack's ceiling. The sides of the holes were worn smooth on top, but crusted with dark dried residue in ripples along the sides and bottoms. Footprints were visible in the chalky gray dust on the hutches' floors. They looked like they'd been made by bare human feet with broad, splayed toes. A faint odor of blood and vomit wafted through the blackened buildings, so slight that Isiem wasn't sure it was really there.

  Otherwise, the shacks were empty. Seeing nothing else, Isiem went on to the larger hut in their middle.