The severed head of the foul thing fell to the floor and came to rest a short distance away. A gush of the maggoty worms spouted forth from the body’s severed neck, just as blood fountains from a decapitated corpse. The stream of vile stuff engulfed the ghastly head as the body spewed forth its corrosive contents, and worms and head vanished in a cloud of noisome fumes. The body thrashed and jerked for a couple of minutes while Gord watched it warily, but the thing showed no signs of having regenerative powers. Then the corpse was still.
Carefully avoiding the stinking remains, Gord began a quick search of the area beyond the chamber where the battle had taken place. There were several rooms nearby—in fact, a whole suite of lavishly appointed subterranean chambers fit for the habitation of a great priest of Nerull.
What came next was almost child’s play to Gord. He located the secret repository of the cleric without difficulty, noted its warding signals, and effectively masked them with stuff from the priest’s own sacramental coffer—blue-purple unguent and a dark altar cloth served to mask and negate the forces bound within the sigils that had been enscribed to protect the cleric’s treasury from violation. Hidden needles coated with venom were even more easily blunted, and the locks on the huge coffer were a joke to the young thief. In minutes he had the chest open and its contents exposed for his examination.
Ignoring the valuables of clerical sort, and the leather bags of coins as well, Gord singled out several finely made caskets, knowing that such containers were likely to be used for prized gems and precious jewelry pieces.
“Beautiful!” he gasped involuntarily as he opened the first and viewed the array of gems within. Huge emeralds, massive rubies, great, glittering diamonds. A rainbow of colors, and a strange stone too. The latter, held in a special velvet pouch, was a round, nearly fist-sized black opal whose green flecks pulsed with strange lights and at whose heart a vermilion light like a flame seemed to dance. “This I’ll have too,” Gord uttered in awe, and he thrust the orb of opal into his own leather pouch quickly. Though this gem alone was a monumental prize, he didn’t forget that he was here first and foremost to regain the nine black star sapphires.
By the time he had searched the last of the little coffers. Cord’s mood was one of utter despair. Although he had tucked several other fine pieces of jewelry into his pouch, he had failed to locate the gems he so desperately desired.
“Gods rot you, stinking priest of a misbegotten one! I’ll have them from you personally!” With that, Gord returned to the little chamber and worked the sconce again—but this time he dived into the larger chamber as the small room began to rotate back to its previous position.
“You’ll come back through this portal, priest,” Gord muttered. “On that I’ll stake my life. And when you come from your unholy sacrifices this night, I shall be here to greet you.” Then he found a chair, pulled it to a convenient place near where the secret entrance to the place would open, and waited inside his self-imposed prison.
Several hours later the chief cleric of Nerull did indeed return to his own chambers, alone and exhausted from his night of obscene rituals and debauchery. The dark stains of blood and other substances covered him, and he was busily stripping off his soiled gown even as the little chamber rotated to allow him access to his apartments. Gord fell upon him with remorseless fury, pummeling the priest into senselessness before the man could do more than utter a brief, shrill scream for help. Gord used the cleric’s stained cassock to stifle that noise even as he beat the fellow unconscious.
After binding the priest’s arms and legs with cords, Gord turned him face down and slid his dagger beneath the man’s chin, placing the edge of the blade a fraction of an inch from the exposed flesh of his throat.
“Awaken, grave-rat!” Gord commanded, pouring some wine from a bottle he’d found on a table in the bedroom of the cleric. As the liquid splashed on the back of his head, the priest of Nerull groaned and tried to raise his face. He turned his eyes to the side and up, and even in his half-dazed state managed to get out a threat.
“I’ll have your life and soul for this, intruder! Don’t you know who I am?”
“Stay still, or who you were will be the correct terminology,” Gord said, using his free hand to emphasize the point by shoving the fellow’s head back down with force. “Feel the burning at your throat? That is where my dag’s edge even now slices a bit of your tender flesh. Speak only to answer my queries, or that edge shall bite deeper!”
The priest became instantly motionless. “What do you want?”
“Only a bit of information. Give me that, and I will spare your vile life. Where are the nine black star sapphires set with diamonds in a necklace of wrought platinum?” The question was met with silence, so Gord brought his weapon hand up a bit and drew the blade of his dagger ever so lightly across the man’s throat. That was all it took.
“Wait, wait! I recall the piece you refer to now—I had forgotten it, that’s all! I’m trying to cooperate!” The malign priest whined the last piteously.
“Where is the necklace, then?”
“It’s… I… not here,” he gasped fearfully.
“You lie! It must be here. I know those gems are far too valuable for you to allow them to be out of your possession!”
“No, no! I lie not, I speak true to you. Precious they were, but not so precious as a great op—er, another gem which was given in exchange.”
Gord was unable to believe his ears. “When? When did this exchange take place?” He brought his dagger away from the bound man’s throat, feeling himself getting caught up in the cleric’s explanation and not wanting to accidentally slash his quarry before he had told everything.
“But a sennight ago.”
“Who did you bargain with, then? Tell me straight and quickly. My dagger thirsts for your foul life, cannibalistic rat.”
“It was a being of great power, one no longer human, but grown mighty and unhuman, a dweller in shadow, a servant of my god, a devoted follower of Ner—”
Thump! Gord struck the cleric hard across the temple with the pommel of his dagger before the man could finish uttering the name. There was no sense in taking chances that the terrible one would hear and attend, for they were within the deity’s own house and his great priest was being threatened. The fellow stirred and moaned, so Gord spoke again.
“Mind your tongue! I am not so foolish as to allow it to wag thus. Try once more, and I’ll end its wagging forever. Now, say it short and straight: To whom did you give those stones I seek?”
“The Prime of evil shadows, the Lich of Liches—that is with whom I exchanged treasures.”
“What made him desire to part with that… other stone of greater value than the black sapphires? Surely one so puissant as this Prime would recognize his loss and your gain.”
“He wished to remove his from… let us say that my possession of the one he held pleased his sense of propriety,” the priest hurriedly substituted. He was beginning to regain his senses and gather his courage as well.
“The stones are now with him?” Gord demanded. When the cleric answered affirmatively, the young adventurer then asked, “And the lick you call Prime is where?”
“In the Realm of Shadow, thief, and beyond your reach!”
“So be it,” Gord said calmly. He struck the fellow’s shaven pate again. “You’ll sleep awhile, now, and give me ample time to leave your precincts.” Gord was much distressed at the words of the priest, but he was used to disappointment. Besides, someday perhaps he would find a way to penetrate the plane of shadowstuff and seek out the lich and his treasure then. Now it was high time for him to be leaving here with his mementos. The temple would shake under the wrath of the high cleric when the man discovered that his treasury had been looted and his prized black opal was missing.
It would have been an easy escape, but for his getting temporarily lost in the maze of narrow passages beneath the temple. It took far longer than Gord had hoped it would for him to retrace his
steps and find the way above. By then the high cleric had recovered his senses, freed himself, and sounded the alarm. Even so, Gord had nearly made it to a place where he could get over the surrounding wall when he was spotted.
A swarm of arrows and bolts swept around him, humming and buzzing like angry wasps as they passed close. A thick quarrel took the young thief in his left arm, and the shock of its entry made him feel. Cursing, he managed to break off the feathered end and push the tip through, but that act took time, and it was his undoing.
The shaven-headed high priest had been helped above by then, and his dark eyes fell upon the struggling rogue with evil anticipation. Uttering a singsong litany of vilest sort, the cleric called upon his dark deity to deliver the most terrible of painful deaths to the man who had dared to violate temple and priest both! The spell spewed forth from the priest’s mouth even as his arm raised and his long fingers shaped themselves into a pointing sign of evil. A dark and evilly red ray of light sprang from his hand, and the lurid ray struck Gord full on his turned back, bathing his head and torso in awful radiance.
The pain was soul-wrenching. Gord tried to scream it away, but his throat was constricted. Then his heart stopped, and total blackness washed over him. The last thing he remembered was reaching for the great opal, intending to throw it over the wall so that the foul priest would never regain it, but he acted too late. He got it into his hand, but then the ray of death washed over him, his arm refused to obey, and then he felt nothing.
A flare of green light enveloped the body, nearly blinding the priest and anyone else who happened to be looking in that direction, as the would-be escapee fell lifeless to the ground. The great cleric of Nerull shook his head to clear his vision, crying, “Hurry, dogs! Bring me that body! I am not through yet!”
A score of lesser clerics and guards scuttled to obey. Flaring torches made the yard surrounding the temple into a scene straight from the hells, but there was no other way. Cleric-cast illumination would alert all of Dyvers that something serious was amiss at Nerull’s great house, and that was unallowable. Several of the group surrounding the area where the intruder had fallen detached themselves and came slowly back toward their master.
“Hurry, run! I command it!” There was no instant response, but finally one of the men shuffled forward to stand before the high cleric, saying: “I… we can find no body, master. There is but a scorched outline where the swine fell dead. Perhaps your power burned him to nothingness!”
The bald-pated chief priest scowled and struck the underling across his cringing face. “Bah! Look further! Take all night if necessary, but do not come into my presence again without the corpse of that man!” Then the cleric retired into his temple’s safe confines.
Although the matter wasn’t entirely forgotten, the search for the body was abandoned at dawn an hour later. After all, reasoned the priest, perhaps his curse had indeed blasted the fellow. What other explanation could there be?
Chapter 18
“Get up. You are not dead.”
“Yes, I am. Leave me in peace.”
The toneless voice continued, not bothering to point out the contradiction, the impossibility of someone dead being able to converse. “You are not dead. You will arise.”
“No!” The voice was beginning to annoy him, and with irritation came added strength to resist. “I am dead! I will do nothing but remain so.”
“Get up. You are not dead.”
That did it. Gord would show this monotonous know-it-all a thing or two! He sprang erect suddenly, hands reaching for his weapons. A flash of pain sent him reeling—his right arm was fine, but his left was injured. Gord looked and saw a stub sticking from the gray flesh of his bicep. A broken crossbow bolt was causing the severe pain. How in the hells had that happened?
“Go to Shadowhall now and—” The toneless voice stopped in mid-sentence.
Gord looked up. The sound issued from a shapeless thing of black, a seemingly formless coalescence of shadows that floated nearby. As he peered at the phenomenon, Gord inadvertently raised his right hand toward his injured left arm. This movement partially exposed what he held clenched in his fist, and at the sight of it the shadowy thing recoiled, wafting back as if afraid.
“Shadowfire!” it said. Somehow the lifeless voice carried a note of awe in it.
Now Gord looked down, wondering what the strange being was going on about. He saw a glimmering in his own hand, a play of blackness interspersed with motes of deep green, all made vivid by what seemed a tongue of flame that appeared and disappeared within the great gem’s heart. What the dancing devas was this?
“This?” Gord inquired, thrusting the orb out toward the thing of shadows as he spoke.
Now the creature jerked backward as if yanked by a rope. Fully twenty feet rearward it flew before it came to a shuddering halt. “No!” the shadowy speaker intoned loudly. “Keep it from me and I will not tell the master anything about you,” the creature called as if pleading.
Gord sat down on the silvery-black grass, feeling tired and weak. The black thing remained distant, but Gord was not satisfied at all. “What are you talking about? Who is the master? Where are we? What do you mean, I’m not dead?”
As he addressed the thing of shadows, Gord had placed the massive black opal in a pouch. Noting this, the creature again drifted nearer as it replied. “I speak of your half-existence, once-man. The master I speak of is the lord of this place, Shadowrealm, the place where we both must dwell eternally. You thought yourself dead…. I read the thoughts plainly for a time. You are not, of course, nor are you un-dead. You are in Shadowrealm, so you are half-living, half-dead, neither and both.”
The lack of intonation, the flatness and droning quality of the thing’s voice, made Gord grind his teeth. He did not like the creature, whatever it might be. “What are you? Where is this so-called master of yours?” He stressed the last word of the second question in order to let the dull monstrosity know that what it considered to be its lord did not affect Gord’s status.
“I am important. Don’t you recognize an adumbrate when you see one?”
“Don’t answer a question with another,” Gord admonished the black, formless thing, “and pay attention too! I also asked where your lord was.”
Now the thing somehow managed to sniff, and the mass of shadows grew thicker and distended, as if it were drawing itself up. “His Umbrageous Majesty, the Lord of Murk, is my master—and yours too, now that you are consigned to Shadowrealm. His Gloominess just happens to be nearby at this very moment, for the Chiaroscuro Palace is readying for the Great Celebration.”
The self-proclaimed adumbrate had continued approaching as it spoke. While its toneless voice betrayed virtually no emotion, the posture the inky monster assumed, if such could be determined in a creature like this, seemed to indicate extreme hostility. Gord read it as a desire to attack and harm him, so he reacted accordingly. As the thick clot of shadows wafted nearer, the young adventurer gathered his strength and sprang to his feet. His sword’s short blade rasped forth even as he gained his footing, and the silvery steel darted out to come within a foot of the creature.
With a sound like wind stirring dead leaves, the adumbrate darted aside from the threatening point, little streaks of silvery light arcing within its body as if the thing were a miniature stormcloud filled with lightning. “So, manling,” it now boomed, its voice taking on a tinge of emotion. “You think to threaten me with a mortal blade?” Still venting the dusty, stirring sound, It shot a short distance sideways, then came toward Gord as if to envelop him.
The sword seemed to react of its own volition. One moment it was elsewhere, the next it was a bar before the adumbrate’s near-lightning advance. The glistening metal seemed to glow, become molten, as the thing of shadows touched it. Gord felt a shivering surge of force flow up his arm as the blade contacted the creature. There was a rush, the sound of a gust of wind venting down a chimney, and a faint, nearly indiscernible keening. Then his sword wa
s plain metal again and the thing was gone. “Good riddance,” Gord murmured, giving his full attention to his wounded arm once again.
Withdrawing the shaft was painful, but Gord knew it had to come out, and he managed to endure the hurt. A gush of black-looking blood came from the wound as the wooden shaft was pulled free. Then Gord clamped a clean strip of cloth from his shirt against both sides of the bicep, slowly winding it to make a tight binding around the injury. It wasn’t pretty, and the cloth already showed dark stains of blood, but Gord thought the bandage would suffice. He had taken far worse wounds and still lived to speak of them.
As he rested and regained his strength, Gord rummaged around in his belongings, trying to find a small flask of spirits he was sure he had tucked away somewhere, and also to see what else he had. Perhaps something he carried would jog his memory. As it was, the young man had absolutely no recollection of how he had come to this… this Shadowrealm, as the now-vanished and presumably dead adumbrate had identified this place.
It certainly wasn’t home. Gord glanced around and saw nothing that even vaguely reminded him of Oerth, let alone Greyhawk. The sky was a velvety canopy the color of old charcoal. There were spots in It all right, but they were gleaming points of black, and a sphere of deep metallic hue cast a faint, mercuric light upon the world over which it floated. The world, Gord noted, was of all blacks and grays. There seemed to be vegetation, grass and trees, bushes and flowers too, all of dun coloration, some opalescent, some actually translucent. Furthermore, the landscape seemed to be a dance of shadows that shifted and flowed almost as if he were ambling through it rather than sitting quietly observing the scene. “Shadowrealm indeed!” he muttered to himself as he went back to examining his belongings for some clue.
[Gord the Rogue 05] - City of Hawks Page 22
