Shadow's Witness (27 page)

From the sounds of his breathing, Cale could tell that Jak lagged a bit behind him. Shorter % half, the little man could not move as quickly as Cale across the wall. Nevertheless, Jak made steady progress.

Hallway across, Cale spared a glance dawn between his feet at the gate. Emptiness opened beneath him. He seemed not to be climbing a wall only four feet above the surface of the stairs, but instead clinging to acliff face that overlooked a fall into infinity.

Dizsdness sent his head reeling. Gasping, he snapped his head up, clenched his eyes closed, pressed his cheek into the cool stone of the wall, and held on to let the dizziness pass. Jak must have heard his distress.

“You all right, Cale?” the Uttfe man asked, concern in his voice. “Gale?”

I’m all right,” he managed at last, eyes still closed. “Just a little dizzy.” He felt like the wall he hung on was spinning. “Just don’t look down.”

Jak chuckled, a laugh that gave way to a grunt as he climbed another step. “Dark, Cale, that’s the first ru—”

The hairs on Gale’s neck rose and a wave of cold like an icy wind sent shudders through his body. An otherworldly moan of hate rose from within the gate to fill the stairwell. Though he could not turn to see it, he knew the shadow demon had burst from the void like a black arrow shot. He could feel its evil presence behind him, could feel its unearthly cold radiating into his flesh, could feel its malice-filled, yellow eyes burning holes into his back. He and Jak were helpless on the wall. They were dead men.

“Cale!” Jak shouted, “Watch out!” Cale could hear the terror in the little man’s voice. Theshhk of a drawn blade sounded. Jak had somehow drawn a weapon.

Cale struggled to fight off the dizziness. Hang on, Jak, he thought urgently. Hang on.

“Calel Dark, Cale!”

i i

Despite the dizziness, the fear in Jak’s voice pulled his head around. Careful not to look down, he opened his eyes and looked over his shoulder. The cold from the demon hit his face like a gust of Hammer wind. The creature hovered gracefully over the center of the gate, facing Jak. Its great wings—which beat only rarely—stuck out behind it and hung in the air so close to Cale that he could almost reach out and touch them. Though it seemed composed of nothingness, the nothingness somehow had substance. Cale could see the sleek muscles that rippled beneath its skin, vicious claws at the end of its long, graceful arms. Streamers of darkness, empty ribbons of shadow, floated about its being like a black mist.

The little man had drawn his short sword and hung precariously by his feet and one hand. Looking over his shoulder with wide green eyes, he tried to wave the blade defensively to keep the demon at bay. The pathetic effort did nothing to deter the dark horror. It flitted back and forth around the little man, outside the reach of the blade. Playfully, it threatened again and again with its claws. Cale could sense its hunger building as it whetted its appetite on Jak’s fear.

Cale could not dear his damn head!

“Cale,” Jak cried. He frantically waved tfie short sword as the demon feinted an attack. The swing unbalanced him and his hold slipped. Desperately, he twisted back to the wall and tried to save himself with his blade hand. The short sword clanged into the stone, fell from his fingers as he clutched the wall, and dropped into the oblivion of the gate.

Dark,” Cale heard Jak mutter into the wall.

The demon hissed in triumph, an otherworldly sound that Cale felt more than heard, a shriek of pure hate that sounded as though it had originated from deep within the earth.

Jak dung to the wall, helpless and trembling. “Gale, help,” he cried.

It tore Gale up inside to do nothing, but if he moved, he would surely lose his balance and fall into the gate.

With Jak defenseless and terrified, Gale sensed the demon’s hunger rise until it reached a crescendo, felt its desire to feed radiate in palpable waves from its being.

Jak, desperate now, reached into his pocket and searched for his holy symbol—whether for comfort or for spellcasting, Gale could not tell. The little man released one hand from the wall and twisted his head so that he could see the demon. The black horror reared back with one of its claws, slowly, teasingly, prolonging the inevitable. Jak’s eyes looked past it and met Gale’s.

1 can’t go like the Soargyls, Erevis,” he announced. “I can’t.”

With those words, he let go his hold on the wall. Staring at Gale the while, he fell soundlessly into the emptiness of the gate and vanished into the void.

“No!” Gale shouted, and nearly leaped in after him. “No! Jak!” The dizziness gave way-before a wave of grief and anger. “No, godsdammit!”

With its meal now gone the demon howled in frustration. It faced down toward the void and began to dart into the gate after the little man but it stopped cold in mid-air, seeming suddenly to remember Gale. Its head turned slowly upward and its baleful yellow eyes narrowed to sparks.

Gale looked down over his shoulder and met that gaze unflinchingly. Anger fed his courage. He no longer feared this demon.

“Do you remember me, you black son of a whore?” he snarled. Though he nearly fell as a result, he freed one-of his hands to awkwardly draw his long sword. “I’m the one that cut you before, remember?1’

” Its eyes widened and it cocked its head thoughtfully.

Tfou do remember, don’t you?” He waved the enchanted blade in challenge, tried to find a way to plant his feet so that he could somehow fight, somehow avenge Jak. He realized immediately that it was impossible. His gaze fell to the void below him to the emptiness that had swallowed his best friend.

A voice in his mind screamed accusations. Jak was only here because of me. He was only here because of me!

Though the little man’s final glance had held no blame, Gale couldn’t help but berate himself. Once again his selfishness had led someone he loved to be harmed. First Thazienne and now Jak.

All because of me…

The demon drifted nearer, a mere armslength away. Gale ignored the cold that radiated from it. His rage lent him warmth, his self-loathing insulated him and made the demon’s malice for him seem paltry by comparison. He sensed its hungry anticipation but gave it no terror to feed upon. It flapped its wings once and screamed hate into his face.

He stared back into its malice filled yellow eyes and made the only decision he could. He had to go after Jak. The little man had always stood with him, come what may. Gate could not desert him now, not if there was any chance he still lived.

“But first you, you bastard,” he angrily muttered.

The demon hovered directly behind him. It flitted .about him and tried to make him afraid. Gale no longer felt fear, only hate. Hate for what had happened to his friend Jak.

Without another thought, he summoned his strength and leaped backwards off the wall. Spinning around in mid-air, he dexterously reversed his grip on the long

sword and held it before him in a two-fisted grip, a unicorn horn of enchanted steel.

Startled, the demon’s eyes flashed with surprise. Gale sensed it hiss. Lightning quick, it lashed out with a claw. Cale didn’t know if it hit him. He flew into the demon and lashed out with a terrible strength fueled by rage. Even as he Yell toward the void, he drove the enchanted iron between the demon’s eyes and pierced its head. The long sword bit deep into the demon’s shadowstuff. Black mist exploded from the wound. Its scream resounded in Gale’s ears like the cries of slaughtered cattle. He kept his grip on the long sword’s hilt as he plummeted toward the gate. The enchanted iron split the demon from head to groin, the tension similar to cutting a bed sheet in twain. A cloud of shadowstuff exploded around Gale, the stench overwhelming. The demon’s scream of agony sounded loud in his ears—a death scream for certain.

He felt satisfaction for only a fraction of a heartbeat before he and the remains of the demon fell into the gate. When he hit the surface, he felt a brief tension followed by sudden give, as though he had jumped through the skin of one of Brilla’s day-old soups. A charge raced through his body and he felt like he was swimming in syrup. A weight pressed against his chest. He gasped for breath but his constricted throat could draw in only the reeking stink of the dead demon’s shadowstuff. His body went numb and he passed out.

24O • Paul S KMKŤ

J ak regained consciousness. Apart from the soft rush of an uncomfortably warm wind, Jak heard only silence. He lay on his back and remained perfectly still, afraid to move* afraid, to dispel the illusion that he was still ah’ve.

Still alive? How can that be? he wondered;

He had expected to awaken in whatever happy afterlife awaited servants of the Trickster. Brandobaris’s teachings were frustrat-ingly, and Jak suspected, deliberately, vague on this point—but he knew from the aches in his body that he was still composed of flesh and bone, not spirit.

Surprising, he thought. He knew the gates in the guildhouse to be voids, empty pits in reality that ate away at his home plane like

pools of acid. He had assumed that flesh-and-blood beings could not withstand contact with them, and had figured physical death in the gate a better fate than the death of his soul at the hands of the shadow demon. But he hadn’t died, and here he was.

Wherever here was.

He dared not open his eyes, at least not yet. He knew from the smell in the air and the coarse earth beneath his body that here had to be some demonic wasteland of the sort he had heard of in adventurers’ tales. He was not yet ready to face that.

He took mental stock of his body and realized with alarm that breathing came only with difficulty. His muscles, his body, and his very soul felt dulled, like a once-colorful painting faded by time and sunlight to drabness. His brain felt sluggish, his thoughts thick and muddy. A side effect of passing through the gate, he assumed. Yet he was alive! His hand fumbled ineptly for the luckstone at his waist.

The Lady still favors us, Cale—

His happiness at finding himself alive vanished. Jak had left Cale back in the guildhouse, left him alone with the shadow demon helpless on the wall, left him alone to feed the demon with his soul.

I’m sorry, Erevis, he thought, and tears trickled out from under his closed eyelids. I couldn’t die like the Soargyls. I couldn’t be drained by the demon into dried hunks of soulless flesh. I just couldn’t.

But I left Cale to die that way, he accused. He hadn’t planned it that way, he just hadn’t wanted to die that way himself. He realized now what he had done and the realization pained him beyond measure. Cale could not have survived on that wall.

More tears leaked out, ran along his hairline, and pooled in his ears. They did nothing to quiet the accusatory voice he heard in his head. He didn’t try to fight

the grief and the guilt. He couldn’t fight it. He had abandoned his best friend to an ugly death.

I’m sorry, Erevis.

He had known Cale for over ten years, and had never met a man more loyal to his friends, or more fearless in the face of danger. Cale had lived for so long on the fine line that separated life from death that he walked it with the practiced ease of a festival acrobat on a tightrope. Jak had loved him like a brother and abandoned him like a coward.

I’m sorry, my friend.

He lay still and let the tears flow until the pangs of guilt began to dull. He had to get up, to try to find a way back. If their situations had been reversed, Cale would have carried on. Jak would, too. He would take up Gale’s cause as his own. Yrsillar had one more death to account for.

He forced his sluggish lungs to draw in a deep breath. The acrid air left a foul grit on his tongue that tasted sulfurous and smoky. He cleared his throat to fight off a fit of coughing. Ready, he sat up with a slight grunt and snapped his eyes open.

I should’ve kept them closed, he immediately reprimanded himself.

As he had suspected and feared, a wasteland of coarse gray ash surrounded him in all directions. It rolled in dunes in the ceaseless breeze like sand in a great desert. Jagged slabs of basalt as sharp as spear tips occasionally jutted through the ash, tombstones in a graveyard that extended for infinity. No plants and no life. A wasteland of emptiness. There was no sign anywhere of the gate he had traveled through. The trip here was one-way. He was trapped.

I’m in the Abyss, he thought. Yrsillar’s home plane. The realization hit him hard and made him weak.

He looked skyward to see an unbroken blanket of

soot-colored clouds as lifeless and gray as the sea of ash under his feet. Occasionally, flashes of sickly blue—the color of ghoul flesh—backlit the sky. Rather than enlivening the sky, the sudden, silent bursts of color served only to accent the drab desolation of the gloom.

Low on the horizon hung a gigantic vortex of swirling nothingness. A maelstrom that was a mirror image of the gates in the guildhouse but magnified in size a thousandfold. Streaks of ochre and viridian mixed with the-gray and churned toward the empty center of oblivion. No sun or moon hung in the slate sky. Jak felt certain that this hellish realm had never seen the light of a sun, that it stood forever illumined in only perpetual twilight. He clambered to bis feet and brushed a stray hair out of his eyes. When he did, he saw— “What in the …”

Wisps of white vapor steamed from his exposed skin like smoke from a leaf fire. Dumbfounded for a moment, he merely stared. Contrary to the direction of the wind, the vapor rose from his flesh and floated inexorably toward the vortex in the sky as though drawn by a lodestone. Then the realization dawned on him. My soul is slipping away.

Small wonder he felt so torpid. The negative energy of the maelstrom would eat his life just as surely as the demons that dwelled here. Thankfully, he had prepared for something similar back at Brilla’s place.

Hurriedly, he pulled forth his holy symbol. The green tourmaline in the eagle’s talon looked so dull as to appear nearly black. He began to incant the syllables to a spell that would protect him from negative energy. He had memorized the spell several times to protect himself and Cale when they fought the demon, but he thought it would work equally well against the pull of the maelstrom.