purple blood had pooled about the nearly beheaded corpse of a ghoul.
Must have, he thought, because the hallway erupted into motion.
Misty ghouls lurched from their hiding places and charged to the point where the body would lay. There they stopped, confused. Seeking an unseen foe, they turned about and clawed at the air. So many surrounded Cale and Jak that they seemed engulfed in the morning fog that rolled off the Elzhimmer River-located off the far shore of Selgaunt Bay-most autumn mornings.
Cale gave Jak a reassuring glance, then the two friends set to work.
Grim-faced, Jak ran one through with his enchanted short sword. It buckled, clutched its gut, collapsed to the floor, and disappeared. He stabbed another one through the face with his dagger, to no effect.
'The dagger won't bite,' he announced, unnecessarily loud in the otherwise silent hallway. 'Only magical weapons will work.' He sheathed the dagger and gripped the short sword with both hands.
* Mercilessly, Cale sliced the head from a ghoul, then another, then another.
Confused and falling dead without explanation, the pack milled about in the hall. They jumped at one another, clawed and bit at the empty air. In the chaos, individual creatures became difficult to distinguish. Cale now saw only a swirling fog. He knew the hallway back on their home plane must be awash in purple Mood, gray bodies, snarls, and guildhouse debris. Here, there was only silence.
v sliced indiscriminately at the mist and killed ghoul within reach. Unable to defend themselves, unable even to see their attackers, the ghouls died one after another. Without mercy or remorse, Cale
; them down. He felt no guilt, only grim satisfaction, ghouls that had attacked Stormweather, had preyed on the defenseless, had cut down men armed with dinner utensils and women armed only with screams. They deserved what they got.
For Stormweather, he thought with each slash, for Thazienne.
The survivors swirled around him, confused, close to panic. He raised his blade highA sudden realization hit him like a bolt of lightning. He stopped in mid-stroke and looked beside him to Jak. 'Yrsillar doesn't know we're here;' he said, certain. 'He thinks we're still in the real guildhouse.'
'What?' With his short sword, the little man ran through the gfcoul Cale had spared. It collapsed, writhed, and dissipated into nothingness. 'How do you know that?'
Cale took no time to explain. The panicked ghouls started to mill down the hall toward the shrine. 'Don't let any get away!'
He ran down the hall and ripped one of them in two with an overhand slash. The misty body split neatly down the middle and dissolved into nothingness. He cut down another, and another. Jak leaped into their midst and did the same. None escaped.
Afterward, he and Jak took in the spotless hallway, their unbloodied clothes. Back on their own plane, the hallway must be littered with carnage. He and Jak had administered a slaughter and yet remained clean. He found that thought unsettling.
'YrsiDar must not know we're here. He knows his ghouls are vulnerable to attack from this plane. If he had known we were here, he would have been waiting for us himself, not allowed his ghouls to be slaughtered this way.'
Jak winced at his choice of words. Pretending not to notice, Cale waved his blade around the hall to indicate the implied carnage. ''They were waiting to ambush us in the real guildhouse. They didn't have any idea we were here. Neither does Yrsillar.'
Thoughtful, Jak scratched his head and finally nodded agreement. 'Makes sense. We've only been here a quarter-hour or so. That's not very long. He must not yet have learned that we passed through the gate and survived, much less stumbled onto the planar correspondence.'
Breathing hard, flush with their success and eager for more, Gale nodded, 'We need to find a way back home quickly. He's vulnerable now. We killed the shadow demon and we killed the ghouls. Yraillar will have to face us alone.' Cale felt confident about the result of that confrontation.
'Agreed,' Jak said, rallying himself. 'We find a way back and hand that bastard his guts.' The little man shot Cale a grim smile, but his confidence gave way to nervousness when he eyeballed the golden aura that protected him from the Abyss. 'Let's move fast, though. I don't know how much longer this spell is going to last.'
Cale held out his arms and checked his own protective spell. The golden light seemed to have faded somewhat, and the soft sparks and pops sounded less frequently than before. If the unrelenting energy of this plane fully drained their spells, he and Jak were dead.
His hand went to Ms pocket, and he ran his fingertips over the felt mask. Just a while longer, he hoped, just a while longer.
'Let's move.' Cale strode for the closed shrine doors. The shrine to Mask seemed the center of this whole affair. The worship hall of the Righteous Man, the place Cale had first encountered Yrsillar, the home of the god for whom Cale seemed called as a Champion.
It was as likely a place as any for a gate back home.
Before they reached the doors, the telltale ripping sound of sundered reality stopped them cold. Without words, they fell into a wary crouch. Back to back, Cale watched the shrine doors while Jak watched the hall behind them.
A thin red line appeared in die air three paces before Cale, a bloody slash that hung unsupported five feet up in the nothingness of the Abyss's air. A gate.
'There,' Cale. said excitedly.
Jak turned and stood beside him. Both watched as the glowing line expanded to the size of a small window. Colors! Colors poured from the hole like a waterfall and overwhelmed the drab gray of the Abyss. The colors of their own plane. The colors of home. Cale had never seen anything so beautiful.
'That's a gate back!' Jak exclaimed.
'I know!'
'They must open and close randomly,' Jak said,'as both stepped toward it. Because it sat so high in the air, Cale knew he would have to lift Jak through and then jumpA shadow blotted out the cascade of hues. A head appeared in the midst of the gate and moved toward them, corrupting the colors with its emptiness. Nause-atingly, the scene called to Gale's mind a giant womb giving birth to a horror. Involuntarily, he and Jak stepped back. The head of a shadow demon crowned. As it did, the shadowstuff solidified into a bluish-gray oval of flesh, featureless but for two malice filled, milky-white eyes and a slit that might have been a mouth. Two powerfully clawed hands appeared to either side and gripped the edges of the gate as though to rip open the birth canal fully.
A shadow demon, Cale realized, another shadow demon.
• It saw them, and the baleful look in its pupilless eyes pierced Cale like a stiletto. The milky-while orbs narrowed to slits and it hissed through the slash of its mouth-the first actual sound Cale had ever heard one of the creatures make.
'Another shadow demon,' Jak said, and sounded tired. 'Gods.' Cale could hear the fear in his friend's voice. The little man began to ease backward.
The demon eyed them evilly, hissed again, and began to squirm through the opening. Its twisted,
•winged form took shape and fully eclipsed the rainbow colors of home pouring through the gate.
'Feed on you,' it whispered through the lipless hole in its face. Its voice grated like fingernails on slate. 'Eat your soul. Feed on you as I fed on the others.' It was through the gate up to the shoulders. A wave of supernatural fear went before it.
The others. Was this the demon that had attacked Stormweather, and not the other that Cale had already killed? Remembering the slaughter in the feasthall, recalling Thazienne's wounded spirit that might never heal, Gale's anger flared white-hot and chased away his fear.
It doesn't matter which one did it, he thought. For that sin, they would all pay. Ill wipe out every gods- damned one of them. He had already killed one, and he could damn well kill another. He would kill another. Without another thought, he charged. 'Feed on this!' he shouted, and raised his enchanted sword high to strike.
With only half of its body clear of the narrow gate, the demon raised its claws defensively, hissed in alarm, and lurched backward. With all his anger, Cale slashed downward into the creature's shoulder and chest. The long sword struck with a satisfying thunk and went a bandwidth deep, opening a bloodless, meaty gash in the demon's gray flesh. The demon screamed and writhed in pain. Though in the throes of agony, it nevertheless swiped a retaliatory daw rake toward Gale.
