tightly wound spring packed behind it, decapitating the pitiful creature with the sheer force of his swing. A faint squeak came from Shal as she started at the sudden movement, and Cerulean's entire coat jiggled for an instant as a jolt of fear charged through his body.
All three hesitated for a moment before going on. Tarl was once again caught up in the sensation that the horrors of the graveyard were being held back, stored up until he, Shal, Cerulean, and Ren, wherever he was, reached the point of no return-literally. Tarl prayed once more to Tyr and pushed ahead as before, moving with painstaking caution. Tarl approached the remnants of a wall that had long since turned to rubble. There were no more bones and no more dismembered body parts to follow. He could only assume that Ren had kept going in the same direction. He stepped gingerly onto the rubble and climbed over the wall as deftly and as quietly as he was able.
Shal and Cerulean were right behind him.
'Wights!' yelled Tarl, charging forward to come to Shal's defense.
Shal had never seen such creatures. Their long hair bristled with filth. Their faces were wild, like men turned beasts, with gaping canine mouths and glaring nocturnal eyes. Their arms were elongated, like an ape's, and their gnarled hands bore claws long enough to inflict lethal damage. The wights separated right away, forcing Tarl and Shal and Cerulean to fight them one on one.
Tarl raised his shield against the wight nearest him. Talonlike claws flailed over and under his shield, and he found it all but impossible to get in a clean swing with his hammer. As fast as he was able to, he returned his hammer to his belt, smashed ahead with his shield, and did his best to splash holy water over the creature. It shrieked in pain and backed away, its flesh burning, but Tarl had not managed to hit any vital area, and much of the precious water went to waste. The creature charged again, and Tarl hurriedly uttered the words of a spell to raise the dead, the only thing he knew of that would stop a wight.
Shal backed up hurriedly, trying to keep enough distance between herself and the nearest wight so that she could utter an arcane command to activate the Wand of Wonder. As awkward as the creature appeared to be in the daylight, its big nocturnal eyes obviously pained by the sunlight, it charged forward, snarling and slavering and lashing out constantly with its yellow-taloned hands.
Just as the wight came near striking distance, Shal finished the incantation for the wand. Instantly flowers sprouted where the wight's claws had been-clean, white daisies with buttery yellow centers.
The wight swiped at Shal with its hands, fully expecting to rake her eyes from her face with one stroke and her bowels from her abdomen with the next. Instead daisies lightly brushed Shal's face and stomach, and the creature recoiled in horror. Shal might actually have laughed if it were not for the wight's furious response. Without wasting another second, it rushed at Shal with its great maw open like a mad dog. Shal couldn't move out of its way fast enough. She just barely had time to blurt a command to activate the Wand of Wonder again. Immediately, so fast that Shal didn't even see it happen, the wight's flesh vanished, and its skeleton crashed against her body. The impact sent her sprawling backward, and she scrambled frantically to get out from under the pile of bones, but the skeleton wasn't animated; the wight was no longer.
Cerulean was glowing purple with fury and magic. Three times he reared and stomped on the grotesque creature in front of him, and three times it managed to claw the flesh of his forelegs as his hooves came down. The magical nature of his attack protected Cerulean from the wight's life-sapping force but not from the pain of the wounds.
Each time the wight's claws combed Cerulean's flesh, blood ran freely, and at the same time, brilliant violet sparks flew, singeing the wight and causing it to cry out in a ghastly screech. It wasn't until Cerulean reared for the fourth time that he caught the wight square on the head and smashed the creature's brains into the ground.
Tarl's spell worked instantly. The spirit of the dead, trapped in the wight, burst from the creature's chest like a great puff of steam. The spirit was free at last, and the wight's hideous body crumpled in front of Tarl like a discarded shirt.
The three would have preferred to take a minute or two to recover. Tarl might even have had the opportunity to notice the blood trickling down Cerulean's legs and do something about it. But the moment of silence following their small victory was broken by the muffled sound of shouts and chants. The voices were eerie, distant, and inhuman, painful and chilling to listen to. They also seemed to have no source. There were no people, no humanoids, no undead visible. Cerulean's ears pricked up, and the horse whinnied and stepped forward past the vault that had concealed the wights. He stopped in front of a small wooden stake that marked a fairly large open area, when his coat began to glow again, this time a soft amethyst.
'No!' Shal gasped the word.
'What is it?' whispered Tarl.
Shal could see the blood herself as she got closer, and she pointed it out to Tarl. 'Ren's down there, underground.'
There was no more to say. Carefully they removed the sod and canvas, which hid a narrow wooden stairway. The stairs were steep, almost ladderlike, and they led down into darkness. With no coaxing from Shal, Cerulean entered the Cloth of Many Pockets. Tarl clasped his holy symbol and started down the stairs. He whispered a prayer as he descended, a selfish wish that the bottom of the stairs would be unguarded. He met no guards. Yet, even had any been present, he wouldn't have been able to see them, for he was in total darkness. He reached up to help Shal through the entry, and then they stood together in the blackness. Shal didn't want to reveal their presence by using her light wand if she didn't have to, so they waited for their eyes to adjust and find some source of light, however small.
They were guided only by the sound of voices, the same strange chanting and shouting they had heard from above, but it was much closer now. A door, the only one they came upon in the dark, opened to a huge underground cavern. There seemed to be precious little light there, as well, but Tarl and Shal could make out figures-scores of them-in the dim, blue, twilightlike rays of light that barely illuminated the room.
The rays were fractured as they were blocked by zombies, absorbed by the blackness of the wraiths, captured and held in the eerie cloudlike presences of the specters, or fragmented by the bones of skeletons. The effect was the surreal look of a nightmare of the kind in which the haunted dreamer runs and runs through bluish mists and suddenly plummets to terrified wakefulness. Smells of mildew, dust, decay, and death made the dank underground air almost unbreathable, and the devilish chanting of the scores of undead set Shal's and Tarl's teeth on edge.
Suddenly a murmur started rippling from the back of the room, quickly spreading to the front. Creatures began to stir and then turned around in waves, causing the bizarre cold, blue light to fracture in new directions, revealing the undead in the cavern in even more horrible detail. Nausea clutched Tarl's stomach, and he was overwhelmed by unadulterated terror. He knew that Shal's presence, let alone his own, could not be a secret to these creatures.
Suddenly the light shifted again as the roomful of graveyard horrors shifted and parted, leaving an aisle between the two human intruders and the front of the room. At the far end of the aisle stood the vampire. Tarl sensed as much as saw him. 'Very goooood,' Tarl heard the creature say, and its spooky, condescending voice made his flesh crawl. The vampire lifted the source of the blue light high into the air. Tarl knew before he ever saw it that it was the holy Hammer of Tyr, but its power and its light had been subverted. Half the hammer radiated blackness, while the blue light that remained was barely a reminder of what it once had been. Tarl shuddered as another wave of nausea and fear passed through his body.
The vampire turned toward Tarl and Shal but didn't acknowledge them in any way. He merely twisted the hammer so its dim light shone on the space directly in front of himself. Shal's gut twisted with the hammer when she saw the figure illuminated by the light.
