walk in the sun made it feasible for them to impersonate living witches for extended periods of time, ghouls stripped corpses of their masked, hooded cloaks and other regalia and used charms to clean and mend the bloody rents. Abandoning solid form, or the illusion of it, a leering ghost streamed and swirled into the body of a woman who babbled prayers for deliverance and thrashed in the grips of her undead captors until the possession was complete.
Nyevarra smiled because here was the
Dai Shan knotted the final strip of torn banner, then cocked his head and contemplated his work.
“Well?” Vandar asked.
“I trust the mighty lodge master-”
“My lodge is
Pleased that the subtle gibe had scored, Dai Shan bowed. “I beseech your pardon for my clumsy speech. I trust the mighty
His fortitude and pride notwithstanding, Aoth Fezim’s steed had lost consciousness midway through Dai Shan’s ministrations. From the Shou’s perspective, it had come as something of a relief. Jet was no mere beast, yet he could display a beast’s ferocity, and Dai Shan had feared that his painful ministrations might elicit a reflexive snap of the griffon’s beak or a slash of his talons.
“All right.” Vandar used the red spear to gesture to the doorway, and a glint of reflected firelight slid along its gleaming length. “Now show me how to open the hidden maze.”
“Noble chieftain, it will be my honor to help you achieve your purposes as expeditiously as may be. Still, is it wise to wander off and leave Jet unattended, particularly when you and I are likewise hurt and exhausted?”
“We can’t leave Cera and Jhesrhi trapped if there’s a chance of getting them out. Move.”
“As you wish.”
Dai Shan had employed his mystical disciplines to diminish the pain of his burns and bruises. Still, he ached as he and Vandar exited the chamber they’d commandeered and descended into the dungeons underneath the ground floor of the Fortress of the Half-Demon. He took care that neither the discomfort nor the resentment it engendered showed in his carriage or his face. The dignity of a Shou gentleman required nothing less.
The appearance of placid serenity could also cause an adversary to relax his guard, and should that occur, perhaps Dai Shan could spin around and rip away the spear the barbarian held poised at his back.
But no. The moment might come when he could rebuke Vandar’s disrespect as it deserved, but for the moment, it would behoove him to remember that he was the one who was injured and that he might actually need the berserker’s help to survive in this pile and the frozen wilderness beyond.
Vandar found a torch to light their way through the depths. Dai Shan could have seen perfectly well without it. That much shadow magic remained to him even in his depleted state. But why say so? The less the barbarian knew about his capabilities, the better.
After the battle for the fortress, the victors had removed human and stag-man bodies for a mass funeral pyre, but the corpses of hobgoblins, trolls, zombies, and even demons still littered the passageways. Picking his way through the mangled remains, Dai Shan led Vandar to a place where a secondary passage ran away from the primary one. The arch at the start of it had three vertical notches at the top.
To Dai Shan’s surprise, Vandar glowered at their surroundings. For some reason, he recognized the spot, and being here apparently stirred an unpleasant memory. “Open it,” he snapped.
Dai Shan briefly considered misdirection to conceal the actual procedure. After all, the trick had worked on Aoth and his compatriots. But they hadn’t expected that particular kind of treachery. Whereas, after hearing the Thayan’s story as relayed by Jet, Vandar surely was on the lookout for it.
So Dai Shan extended three fingers and made a vertical clawing motion. The act was simplicity itself, but it transformed the space beyond the archway.
Where a single passageway had extended to the limits of one’s vision, it now forked, while walls that were formerly smooth and featureless sported a wild profusion of sculpted funeral processions, wreaths, skulls, and other images of mourning and mortality. The darkness itself seemed thicker and, even to a master of shadows, subtly unquiet and malign, like the petals of a carnivorous plant waiting to close on prey. For all his dour toughness, Vandar sucked in a breath at the transformation.
Dai Shan made a second clawing motion, and the tunnel reverted. “You see?” he asked. “I promised to tend the griffon, and I did. I pledged to teach you how to unlock the undead’s hidden paths, and now I’ve done that as well. So dare I hope that the fearless champion is coming to trust me? After all, we have far more reason to join forces and seek bloody vengeance on Mario Bez than to harbor grudges against one another.”
Vandar sneered. “Open up the maze again and show me where you abandoned Cera and Jhesrhi. Then maybe I’ll start trusting you.”
Dai Shan turned his hands up. “Would that I could. But it wasn’t really I who led the ladies, Aoth, and the fey through the arch. It was one of my shadows, lamentably acting on its own initiative and with a shadow’s ruthlessness, and as soon as it entered what I take to be the peculiar demiplane before us, I lost my psychic connection to it.”
Vandar slashed at the air, and the undead’s branching tunnel reappeared. “Then we’re just going to have to hunt for the place. You keep leading the way.”
“With the utmost admiration for your zeal to aid the sunlady and the fire wizard, may I remind you once again that Jet is alone, unconscious-”
“Go!”
Dai Shan bowed slightly and headed for the arch. The air on the other side was cold and stale, and the darkness leeched the brightness from Vandar’s torch until it burned scarcely brighter than an ember.
The gloom smothered sound as well. When Vandar shouted the names of Cera and Jhesrhi, his voice seemed feeble, and the echoes died quickly despite all the stone.
The undead’s tunnels were a somber chaos of sandstone, granite, basalt, and marble, of sarcophagi inside tombs inside greater vaults. Even the most open spaces, graveyards full of worn, leaning headstones and black lakes where moored long-ships awaited lifeless passengers and the touch of a cleric’s torch, lay under arched ceilings instead of open sky.
The maze ran on and on too, branching constantly, until it came to feel impossible and vaguely nauseating that anything so seemingly artificial, so excavated, built, and sculpted, could be so vast. Finally, Dai Shan turned and, as expected, found the red spear still pointed at his torso.
“It would be prudent to turn back,” he said.
“No,” Vandar replied.
“I trust the stalwart warrior realizes how deeply I respect his devotion to his comrades. Still, we’ve found no trace of them, and your torch has burned halfway down. As it stands, we’ll need a modicum of luck to make it back to the mortal world before it dies.”
The Rashemi’s square jaw clenched. “We don’t have to make it all the way back to where we started. We saw other arches and doorways with the three scratches.”
“Which could lead anywhere. As we’ve learned, one of them stranded Captain Fezim in High Thay, and they could deposit us someplace even less convenient. I respectfully urge the valiant swordsman to think.” For once in his ignorant, brutish life.
Vandar scowled. “All right. We’ll go back for now. But I’m not giving up.”
“I never imagined you would.”
Toward the end of the trek back, Vandar’s guttering torch shed scarcely any light. At its dimmest moments, it brought no more sense to the world than the spots and swirls a man saw when he closed his eyes and pressed on the lids.
It was at such a moment that Dai Shan sensed something trailing them back in the murk where the torchlight
