all right,' he replied.
Jak nodded, pulled his pipe from between his teeth, and placed it back in his belt pouch. 'Cale, whatever we're going to do, we've got to do it soon. I don't think our protective spells are going to last very long. At least mine won't.'
Cale ignored the implication in Jak's last statement. 'Let's get moving then,' he said. 'We've got to find a way back to the guildhouse-'
Without warning, the 'arth buckled and roiled like the storm-tossed whitecaps of Selgaunt Bay. Cale's vision blurred. The world spuau^Otee Ia'S^pe dissolved into a gray haze. Unbalanced, his stomach churned and his knees buckled. He struggled to stay upright. He felt himself streanuag forw'Ed^t?R^gh space, out of control. The blurry landscape whipped past, a continuous sheet of indistinguishable gray. He felt sure that at any moment he would be slammed into the side of a basalt slab and pulverized. He tried to speak but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
'Jaaalllkk!'
As though through a howling wind, he heard Jak's poorly articulated reply. 'Caaee!!' The little man was still with him.
He couldn't turn his head to look at Jak, could hardly keep his feet under him.
Without warning, the sensation of motion ceased.
Cale bent over double from the abrupt stop, gasping, but managed to keep his feet by catching himself with a palm on the ground. Beside him, Jak stumbled willy-nilly across the planked floor and slammed against the wall. He recovered himself quickly and looked around, wide-eyed and gasping. Only then did their location hit Cale.
Ploor?Wall?
Floor and wall indeed. He looked around in disbelief. -What in the Hells?'
'Burn me,' Jak oathed.
They stood in the guildhouse. Or at least, they stood in something that looked very much like the guildhouse. Planked floors, rough-hewn stone walls and stairs leading down to a basement. The whole building was composed of the drab, gray color of the void, as though the guildhouse had been remade with the stuff of the Abyss. Reeling, Cale struggled to comprehend what had happened. He turned circles and gawked.
'Dark,' Jak breathed. 'What happened?'
Cale placed his hands on his hips and shook his head, dumbfounded. 'I don't know. Where are we, Jak?
'How should I kn-'
Jak's abrupt stop pulled Cale around in alarm. He turned to see Jak's eyes glued to the demon's corpse on the floor. The same demon's corpse. Relative to Cale and Jak, the twisted body lay exactly where it had been previous to the motion.
'How-'
Jak waved Cale silent, eyes still on the demon. 'Let me think a minute.'
Cale watched his face and waited, and wondered. How did the demon's corpse move with us? What was going on?
So far as he could tell, the abyssal guildhouse seemed an exact copy of the real guildhouse. To be safe, he drew his long sword and kept his eyes on the stairway above and below.
'Gods, Cale,' Jak said. 'I don't think we've moved!'
Cale turned around to face him. 'What?'
'We haven't moved,' Jak said again, nodding. 'I'm certain of it.'
Cale didn't get it. They had been in a desert, and now they were in the guildhouse-of course they had moved.
'How can we not have moved? I felt us move.'
'That wasn't motion,' Jak replied. 'It was… reality changing.'
Involuntarily, Cale's eyes fell to the demon's corpse- exactly the same distance and direction from him as it had been before. He pulled his waterskin from his belt and had a gulp, glad now that he had thought to bring water. 'What do you mean?' He offered the skin to Jak but the little man declined.
'This plane is nothingness, Cale,' Jak explained. 'Literally, nothingness. The gray wasteland from before-that was me. I expected the Abyss to be a wasteland and it was. The plane shaped itself to my expectations. Or my expectations shaped the plane. You see? Just before the guildhouse appeared-'
Cale nodded in sudden understanding. 'I said, 'we've got to get to the guildhouse.'' He looked over at Jak, still not quite believing. 'You're saying that I made this, then?'
'You made it,' Jak affirmed with a nod. 'Your desire made it. Your expectations, your will, whatever. You made it.'
Cale tried to make sense of that. His mind rebelled, but he slowly got his intellectual hands around the idea.
In the end, it really didn't matter whether they had physically moved or had themselves moved reality. Here they were, and they still needed to find a gate back, fast. The golden auras still sparked and sizzled, at war with the energy of the void. There was no telling how long they would last.
'So what now?' Jak asked. He reached for his pipe out of habit but stopped himself before reaching the drawstring on his pouch.
After a moment, Gale made the only decision he could. 'Let's move,' he announced.
'Where to?' Jak asked.
'To the basement,' Gale said grimly. 'Just like we had planned before. Let's see if anyone's home in this guildhouse.'
Gale led as they warily descended the stairs, blades held ready before them. Silence reigned-the silence of the dead. Their breathing, sharp and tense, sounded to Gale as loud as a scream. The stairs evidenced no warping on this side of reality. Like the gates, the warping seemed to be only one way. He kept his back pressed to the inner wall as he spiraled down the stairs.
As with everything on this plane, a dim light with no apparent source illuminated the interior of the abyssal guildhouse. Through the gray, Gale could see clearly for only a short span, beyond he could only make out blurred shapes and movement.
'Light spell?' Jak whispered from behind him.
'No,' Gale softly replied over his shoulder. If there were anything at home here, a light spell would only draw its attention. Gripping his enchanted long sword in a sweaty hand, he advanced. Ahead and below, the
• Paul S Kcmn archway that opened onto the long hallway hi the basement beckoned.
He turned to Jak and spoke in a hushed whisper. 'That archway opens onto the main hall. The shrine is to the left. To the right, the hall ends with the storeroom. I'm thinking left.'
'Left,' Jak agreed with a nod. 'But remember Gale, you're looking for a gate back to our plane, not the demon.'
Without reply, Gale briskly turned to go-if he saw Yrsillar, he intended to put the bastard down-but Jak grabbed him by the arm and pulled him around.
'Listen, Gale, godsdammit,' the little man whispered sharply. 'Demons are stronger on their own planes. We don't want to face Yrsillar here. We don't Burn me, but we don't want to face anything here. We need to get back to our own plane first;'
Gale stared expressionlessly into the little man's eyes. Again he made no reply. He could make no promises. If an opportunity to fight Yrsillar presented itself- here or back on their plane-he would not pass it up, not unless it meant putting Jak in unnecessary danger.
Seeing his expression, the little man apparently understood his resolve. He released Gale's arm. 'I'm with you either way, though,' he said with a sigh.
Gale tried to reassure him. 'I want to find a way back too, little man. I also want Yrsillar dead. Ill try not to let the one get in the way of the other.'
Jak seemed to accept that. 'I want him dead too, Gale.' He hesitated a moment before adding, 'If we kill him on his own plane, he's dead forever.'
'What do you mean?'
'I mean that if we kill him on our plane, we only kill his manifestation there. That doesn't really kill him. It just prevents.him from returning to our plane for a century or so. But if we kill him here…'
