“We’re not far,” Dreeve said, then he turned and returned to his pack.
Slightly more than an hour later, the drumming began. From somewhere up ahead, a deep, rhythmic beat carried through the torpid air and shook the leaves from the cedars. The gnolls whimpered amongst themselves nervously, whining and sniffing at the air.
“They’re summoning the Fane,” Jak whispered to Cale.
“Or acknowledging its arrival,” Cale said.
Eerily, the drums reminded him of a heartbeat, as though the heart of something old, huge, and dark had awakened. The air itself seemed to be vibrating. Jak’s bluelight cast more shadows than it should.
Cale called up to the gnoll, “Dreeve, we need to move more quickly.”
The rest of the gnolls cringed at the loudness of his voice. Except Gez. Gez stared at Cale with something akin to hunger in his dark eyes. Cale remembered Dreeve’s words regarding Gez—He has tasted of manflesh. Cale stared the gnoll down. Gez licked his lips, winked, and looked away.
Dreeve stalked back to Cale, obviously agitated.
“Do not raise your voice, fool human.” He looked from side to side and added, “The lake’s demons are about.”
“Then we’re near?”
Dreeve nodded and said, “Come.”
Cale, Riven, and Jak followed. The rest of the pack trailed them at several paces, ears flat and hackles up.
“This is probably as near the lake as they’ve ever been,” Jak whispered.
Cale only nodded.
Dreeve led them forward through the undergrowth. He signaled a halt near a line of stones. Intuitively, Cale knew it to be a border.
“Look,” Dreeve said, and he gestured beyond the line of stones. “Once, a large lake covered much of this area. Humans regarded it as holy. A great temple-city stood near here at the edge of the water.” He kicked the nearest stone with his foot. “Worked stone. This was a wall.”
Cale kneeled down and examined the stone. Age had left it pitted and cracked, but its sharp corners and smooth face did suggest worked stone. Perhaps a wall, perhaps something else. The area beyond the stones, while otherwise similar to the rest of the forest, looked dimmer, as though the darkness was thicker there. Jak’s bluelight seemed to be shining through fog.
“You see that?” Cale asked Jak.
The halfling nodded and kneeled beside him to run his hands over the stones. Cale withdrew his holy symbol and whispered the words to a spell that allowed him to see dweomers. The stones glowed a faint blue in his sight, as did the air beyond them.
“Magical,” he said to Jak. “The whole area. Only slightly, but it’s there.”
“Old, probably,” Jak said.
The drumbeats stopped. A cold breeze stirred the trees. Cale and Jak shared a look; they both sensed it. They were nearly out of time.
Cale leaped to his feet and said, “Dreeve, lead us to the lake. Now!”
Dreeve snarled, backed up a step, and held up his hands.
“We go no farther, human,” said the gnoll. “None of mine cross those stones. The lake is a few miles ahead, through the trees. I’ve done what you asked. Now, pay as agreed.”
The rest of the pack snarled agreement, while they eyed the forest nervously.
Cale didn’t want to waste time arguing. He figured that he, Riven, and Jak should be able to locate the Lightless Lake from there.
“Very well,” he said to Dreeve.
He reached for his belt pouch—and froze in mid-gesture.
Seven or eight paces behind Dreeve stood Gez, and the gnoll’s entire body glowed blue in Cale’s magically augmented eyes.
Their gazes locked, and in the eyes of the gnoll, in the eyes of whichever one of Vraggen’s agents had taken Gez’s form, Cale saw understanding dawn. The gnoll realized that Cale knew. Gez grinned, made a little half-curtsey, and that feminine gesture told Cale all he needed to know: it was the woman who had first invaded Stormweather Towers and taken Almor’s form.
Cale whipped free his blade and holy symbol.
Dreeve, understanding nothing, and seeing only that Cale had drawn, snarled, leaped backward, and unslung his axe.
“Cale,” Jak began.
“Treachery!” shouted Gez in Common, and he howled.
“You’ll die for this, human,” barked Dreeve, who brandished his axe.
He barked orders in his own tongue.
Behind Cale, Jak and Riven pulled their steel.
The rest of the pack, hackles up, pelted forward, goaded on by Gez.
Cale saw immediately that the situation could only go from bad to worse. Clutching his holy symbol, he whispered a hurried prayer to Mask. Impenetrable darkness cloaked the area, darkness through which only Cale could see.
The gnolls arrested their charge, but Dreeve, undeterred despite his blindness, lunged forward and swept his axe in a semicircle. Cale dodged out of reach, got behind Riven and Jak, and grabbed both by the cloaks.
“It’s me,” Cale said above the growling gnolls, to stop Riven from slicing open his chest.
He pulled both of them beyond the border stones and out of the darkness.
Rapidly, Cale said, “Gez is one of Vraggen’s shapeshifters; the female from Stormweather. Jak, stay back and counter any spell she attempts to cast. She shows that teleportation rod, incapacitate it.”
Jak shook his head and replied, “No, Cale! I—”
“This isn’t the one that hurt you, Jak,” Cale told him. “I need you to do this.”
Jak held his gaze for a moment before nodding and taking his holy symbol in his hand.
Cale turned to Riven and said, “This one doesn’t get away. Understood?”
Riven gave a hard smile and readied his sabers.
“I’ve no problem with that,” the assassin said. “Get rid of that darkness and let’s work.”
Within the globe of darkness, the gnolls, too stupid or untrained to stop moving and listen, instead snarled and hacked about with their axes. It was pure luck that they hadn’t yet killed each other. Dreeve alone maintained his calm. He stood in a defensive crouch, sniffing, and barking for quiet, but his pack did not heed. The Gez imitator edged away from the rest of the gnolls toward the left of Cale’s sphere of darkness.
“To our right,” Cale said to Riven.
Riven crouched, whirled his blades once, and said, “Do it.”
With a mental command, Cale dispelled the darkness. For a fraction of a heartbeat, the gnoll pack stood confused. Cale and Riven leaped the stones and sped past them at Gez.
The woman in Gez’s form saw them coming and her lips curled back from her teeth. Surreptitiously, she made a pass with her hand and began an incantation.
From behind, Jak’s voice rose in answer, chanting a counter spell, and when the impostor finished whatever spell she intended to cast, nothing happened.
Just a pace or two away from Gez, Riven’s voice rose and he shouted a word of power in the dire tongue Cale sometimes heard him utter in his sleep. The pronouncement caused vomit to rush up Cale’s throat, slowing him, but he swallowed it down. Gez recoiled as though struck, grimacing.
Following up on the opening, Riven bounded forward. Sabers whirled, stabbing and slashing. Gez, still partially stunned, could not parry them all and the assassin opened a gash in the false gnoll’s side and forearm. Cale lunged forward to attack from the other side, a low stab, a reverse slash, and an overhand chop. The impostor took wounds in her thigh, chest, and shoulder. She careened backward.
“Show yourself, bitch,” Cale taunted.
The wounds they had inflicted began to close. The false Gez recovered herself, grinned, and winked.
From behind them, Jak shouted, “Look at his wounds, Dreeve! See how they heal? Look! That’s not one of yours, but a shapeshifting demon from the lake!”
With surprising quickness, the impostor pounced forward and went on the attack. Spinning and ducking, she slammed her axe haft into Riven’s ribs and forced Cale backward with a f
lurry of vicious swings. When the false gnoll had a moment to catch her breath, she shouted something in the gnoll tongue and gestured at Cale and Riven, no doubt an attempt to convince her packmates to assist her.
The rest of the gnolls hesitated, pointed, muttered. Cale didn’t need to understand their tongue to know what they said. Gez didn’t fight like a gnoll, and his wounds healed too fast.
More muttering. Still the gnolls did nothing. Cale could sense their fear.
Seeing the hesitation in the eyes of his packmates, the false Gez no longer tried to hide her true nature. She held up a hand, pointed it at Cale, and began to mouth arcane words.
Again Jak’s voice rose in answer, a counter to whatever the creature had intended. The shapeshifter’s spell fizzled in a stream of impotent black energy that leaked from her fingertips.
That was enough for the gnolls. Seeing one of their own casting spells told them all they needed to know. They backed farther away from the combat, looking to Dreeve for guidance. The gnoll leader seemed too surprised to act.
Hoping to catch the impostor off-guard, Cale lunged forward, blade low. Preternaturally quick, the shapeshifter danced backward, knocked Cale’s long sword out of position with her axe, and punched Cale in the nose. Warm blood washed down his face. Eyes watering, he stumbled backward, keeping his long sword in a defensive position as best he could.
The creature might have finished him then, but Riven bounded forward and stabbed the false gnoll through the side with both sabers, halfway to the hilts.
“Let’s see you heal that,” the assassin hissed.
The impostor’s legs buckled, and she growled in pain, but still she managed to smash the base of her axe haft into Riven’s jaw. Blood flew from the assassin’s mouth. He staggered backward and fell, leaving both blades buried in his enemy’s flesh.
The shapeshifter roared, jerked Riven’s blades free, and began to change form.
Gez’s body contorted and twisted, growing broader, more muscular. Fur shrank and vanished into leathery green skin. The head expanded while the muzzle shortened, finally exploding into a huge mouth filled with teeth. Clawed fingers and splayed feet sprouted from the elongated arms and thick legs.
That was too much for the gnolls, who had been watching the combat from a distance. As one, the pack barked its terror and began to flee back the way they had come. Even Dreeve ran.
Moments later, more shouting and the sound of metal ringing on metal sounded from the woods in the direction the gnolls had fled.
Cale and Riven, both bleeding, shared a look. What new foe was this?
They had no way to know. Cale gripped his holy symbol tightly.
The creature didn’t appear surprised by the combat happening in the woods behind her. She looked at Cale with dark eyes.
“You wished to see me, Erevis Cale,” she said. “See me now.”
With that, she leaped at him, quick as a viper, and knocked him to the ground. Her weight pushed the air from Cale’s lungs and cracked several ribs. He tried to bring his long sword to bear but she pinned his arm in a vise grip. Her other claw raked his throat—only the stiff leather collar of his armor kept him alive. He punched at her with his off hand.
With an almost casual bite, she snapped off Cale’s hand just above the wrist and devoured it whole.
Pain exploded in his brain. He screamed in agony, and thumped at her with a stump spraying blood. She tore at his chest, his arm, his throat.
From behind, Cale heard Jak exclaim in a rage, “Bitch!”
And the halfling was upon her, trying to get her off of Cale. He stabbed with his dagger and his short sword. Twice, three times he punctured her skin.
Cale was losing consciousness. He couldn’t breathe. Blood poured from his arm with each beat of his heart. Through eyes gone blurry, he watched her rake Jak across his face. The power of the blow sent the halfling sprawling to the ground.
Cale tried to speak but nothing came out.
Riven was there, shouting something, his sabers whirring. He must have retrieved them. Still she remained on top of Cale, holding Jak and the assassin at bay with claw and tooth. Cale, helpless and dying, could do nothing.
It occurred to him then: she had devoured his holy symbol. He had failed his friends—was Riven his friend?—and his god. His vision began to go dark. He gasped for breath. He tried to shift his chest free of her weight but was too weak.
Then, somehow, Jak was on her back, straddling her the way he might a horse. He was shouting, his face flushed and contorted with rage. Tears poured down his face.
As though from a great distance, Cale heard him screaming, “Die! Die!” and with each word, he stabbed her—in the side, in the throat, in the back. Again and again.
The creature roared, showing Cale a mouthful of teeth, and reared up.
Strangely, when she got off of Cale, he felt no relief. His chest still felt as though a hundredweight sat atop it. He knew then that he would die. A rib had pierced a lung. He was breathing through blood.
The creature drove Riven back, plucked Jak off of her back by the scruff of his neck, and brought him around to her face. One, twice, she cuffed him about the face. He went limp, and she opened wide her mouth.
A sabre blade burst from her chest, spraying blood. She looked at it in surprise, dropped Jak, and whirled—
—to receive a cross cut from Riven’s other sabre, clean through her throat. Her head flew from her body and her huge frame crashed to the ground, missing Cale by a handspan.
The assassin wasted no time. He spared Cale only a glance before he went to Jak and kneeled at his side. He tapped the halfling’s cheeks.
“Fleet! Godsdamnit, Fleet!”
Jak’s eyes fluttered open. Riven pulled him roughly to his feet and dragged him over to Cale. Cale tried to speak but couldn’t manage it.
“He’s dying, Fleet,” Riven said. “Heal him. Now.”
The assassin looked over his shoulder at the forest. The combat there had ceased. Or at least Cale could no longer hear it.
Jak nodded but his eyes welled. He kneeled, put his hands on Cale, and whispered a prayer to Brandobaris. Cale’s pain eased some, but his forearm continued to bleed. His lungs still barely functioned.
Jak looked him in the eyes and mouthed the words, I’m sorry.
Cale understood. Jak had used his spells to counter the creature’s spells. He had no more healing to give.
“Another, Fleet!” Riven demanded. “Another!”
Jak shook his head and muttered, “I don’t have another. It’s not enough.” His voice broke when he said that last.
Cale tried to smile but could not. He was fading.
Voices from behind.
Jak jumped to his feet with a snarl, blades in his fists. Riven too whirled around. Cale couldn’t see but he could hear:
“… tracking you for days. You missed me in Starmantle so you hire curs? They were running as though the Hells had been emptied behind them. What are—”
“Magadon,” Riven said. “Come here!”
Magadon. It took a moment for the name to register. Riven’s guide from Starmantle.
Magadon stepped forward and appeared in Cale’s sight. Clad in woodsman’s garb—weathered green cloak, calf high leather boots, broad belt and wide-brimmed hat—he looked every bit a guide. He wore a bow over his shoulder and held a long sword in his fist. He looked to the corpse of the creature beside Cale and his eyes went wide.
“Slaadi,” he said.
Riven grabbed him by the shoulder and made him look at Cale.
“Forget that,” the assassin said. “Help him.”
Shaking his head sadly, Magadon said, “He’s done for, Drasek.”
In a blink, Riven had a blade at Magadon’s throat.
“Not so,” Riven hissed. With his other blade, he pointed back across the clearing to someone that Cale couldn’t see. “Hold your ground or he dies, then you. Fleet.”
Jak, though obviously confused, interp
osed himself between Riven and Magadon’s comrade, blade bare.
Magadon must not be alone, Cale dimly realized. It occurred to him then that Magadon and his comrade must have been the riders who had tracked Dreeve’s pack from Starmantle.
“It’s all right, Nestor,” Magadon said over his shoulder.
“Godsdamned right,” Riven hissed. “Now do it. I’ve seen you do it before.”
Looking down at Cale, Magadon said, “He’s too far gone.”
“You better hope not. Do it!”
Cale saw the struggle on Magadon’s young, clean-shaven face. The man couldn’t have seen more than thirty winters.
“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said at last.
“Yes, I do,” Riven said, and he pressed his blade into Magadon’s flesh.
The guide stared at Riven’s eye, found nothing, and slowly lowered himself beside Cale. Riven’s blade stayed at his throat the while.
“I suppose you do,” Magadon said, and grim humor tinged his voice.
Riven put his mouth next to the guide’s ear and whispered, “If he dies, you’re dead too. I don’t need a guide without him.”
At that, Magadon actually smiled.
“I see you haven’t changed, Drasek.”
He removed his hat and looked Cale in the face for the first time. Cale saw that his eyes lacked color. They were solid white except for his dark pupils. Ridiculously, those eyes called to Cale’s mind knucklebones that had just come up adder’s eyes. The most unlucky of rolls.
“This won’t hurt,” Magadon said to Cale. “Not you, anyway.”
Despite the attempt at levity, Cale heard the dread in the guide’s voice. Magadon put two fingers to Cale’s forehead and two fingers to his own. Instantly, a charge ran the length and breadth of Cale’s body and he felt his mind connect to Magadon’s, conjoin. The feeling would have frightened him had he not been so weak. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he was not his own man.
Almost as quickly as it had begun, their minds began to separate. As Magadon’s mind pulled away, he drew Cale’s pain after him. Cale’s vision cleared, ribs righted and reknit, slashes closed and sealed, and the stump of his wrist stopped bleeding.