The look on his face was a mask of fear and disappointment.
A single, clear thought shot through Alashar's brain like a crystal arrow: He's the only one who can get me back.
Rushing to his defense, she felt hands and tentacles and tendrils and other things her language had no name for reaching shadow fingers from the grass to caress her legs with agonizing cold. Her body felt as if it would shake itself apart. Reaching the huge creature that charged Shadow, she attacked as if her life depended on it… because it did.
The shadow things-smaller ones-were still converging on Shadow, but he was keeping them at bay with flashes of light-for now.
Alashar sent her whip-rapier into a spinning spiral. The sound of it whistling through the air pierced her eardrums and drowned out Shadow's constant, unintelligible muttering. When the giant shadow thing touched her, her knees gave out; she fought from the ground. She had to shred the thing, swing the whirling blade back and forth through it.
Whistle. Silence. Resistance. Whistle. Silence. Resistance… Finally she just closed her eyes and let her arms do their work.
Then the resistance was gone, and she wanted to believe the giant thing was dead.
She felt a hand on her arm, warm and real, and forced her eyes open to see that it was Shadow. He was saying something, but he must not have been talking to her because she couldn't understand a word of it. Another of the smaller things, this one the shadow of a sort of monster goat, touched her again, but the cold wasn't quite as bad and didn't last as long.
Her body gave out. Though she was already sitting sprawled on the cold ground, she started falling. She took a sharp breath, surprised.
By the time she hit the floor, the cold was gone, the wind was gone, and she saw the pillars and the warmth and light of the spherical laboratory. She lay on her back. Her neck went limp, and her head rolled to one side. Her eyes met the eyes of her simulacrum, also lying flat on its back. As she slipped into black unconsciousness, she couldn't help noticing how green her double's eyes looked.
She didn't remember their being that green.
The bedcovers were oppressively heavy, but Alashar was still shivering when she awoke. The first thing she saw was a carved wooden post-a corner of the bed- and a molded plaster ceiling scarred black from a fire. Movement made her turn her head, light flashed in her eyes, and there was pain. When her vision cleared, she saw a young woman, barely more than a girl. The woman wore a simple white shift, her dark hair in an almost comically girlish bob, her face an expressionless mask of ambivalence. A servant. The girl glanced at her, peered over her shoulder at someone or something, and then walked away, holding a bucket of water that didn't seem heavy enough.
'Don't try to move just yet,' Shadow's voice echoed slightly from across the room.
She moved anyway, and regretted it. The pain in her head was almost overwhelming, almost made her pass out again. She didn't have the energy to fight it. She could and did accept it, sitting up slowly in the opulent bed, shivering, working at breathing.
'Anyone else would be dead,' Shadow continued. 'You're quite something.'
She tried to speak, but her voice came out as a harsh squeak.
'Do you still want to kill me?' he asked her.
She opened her eyes, only then realizing they had been closed, and she could see him sitting in an armchair across the room. The servant girl she'd seen before was kneeling on the scarred wooden floor, still mopping up the rest of the thick, black-red naga blood.
Shadow looked terrible. There were gray-black bags under his dull eyes, and his face was pale. The startling color of his cheeks and lips was gone. He, too, was wrapped in a thick blanket, shivering.
It hurt when she cleared her throat, and she blushed when a single tear rolled down her cheek. 'Yes,' she almost grunted, then cleared her throat again, and her voice was almost back. 'Yes, I have to kill you.'
He smiled and nodded.
'Aren't you going to kill me?' she asked him, not having the energy to fight, and getting the idea that he didn't have the energy to fight either. 'Now's your chance. I can hardly move.'
It took him some effort to look serious and threatening, and the look didn't really come off. 'Honestly, I just don't have the energy to kill you.'
Without looking at either of them, the maid stood up and walked out of the room. The water in the bucket was a sickly pink.
'What was that place?' she had to ask.
'Long story,' was all he could offer just then. 'Suffice it to say, it's the reason your employer wants me dead. One of the reasons.'
'Those things were killing you, too.'
'Yes,' he whispered, 'I wasn't ready. You shouldn't drag someone into a demiplane like that, you know, when he's not ready.'
He smiled, realizing he had been about to do just that to her. She smiled, realizing he knew she'd beaten him at his own game.
'If I hadn't had a link to your simulacrum, the shadows would be feeding on us by now.' Something about the smile on his face warmed her, and she suddenly felt ridiculous, lying in the bed of the man she'd been hired to kill, whom she'd thought she'd decapitated earlier that morning.
'So,' she said, 'you needed me to get back here.'
'Yes, as much as you needed me.' He sighed deeply and forced a smile. 'Does that make us even?'
She peeled back the heavy blankets and managed to move herself up to a sitting position. Warmth and movement were returning quickly. She had always been able to recover quickly, and it had saved her life at least once that day. Her leathers were gone. She was wearing the same plain white shift the maid wore, and she was embarrassed for no good reason at all.
'The maid changed you,' he said. 'I was unconscious, myself.'
She looked at him and nodded, swinging her legs slowly over the side of the high bed. She heard a metallic twang and looked at him again. He was holding her whip-rapier.
'Interesting weapon,' he said, looking at it appreciatively, curiously.
The maid came back in, and there was something wrong. The look on her face made Alashar stand, her knees threatening to give way again but holding firm after a split second. There was a ripping, crunching sound, and the maid's body shook. Something big was in the hallway behind her, filling the door with an amorphous black silhouette. Something thick and green and covered in the girl's thin running blood burst through the maid's chest. Blood exploded out of her mouth, and Alashar couldn't help screaming as the maid was ripped apart in front of her.
Shadow shouted Alashar's name, and she put out her hand, not consciously aware of seeing him throw the whip-rapier. She caught it in one hand and was up and swinging before she even got a good look at the thing coming fast now through the door.
The only way she knew it was covered with hundreds of tentacles was that every time her flashing, shrieking whip-rapier met any resistance, one of the thick, twitching things ended up squirming at her feet. She was aware of its blood, too, hot and yellow-green, sticky and everywhere. The creature was at least twice her size, a wall of writhing green tentacles and dozens of gaping, fang-lined mouths, themselves full of smaller tentacles.
She was shredding it, but stepping back at the same time as it continued to advance on her. She was a blur of motion, her muscles warming and growing looser, more responsive for the exercise.
The fact that the thing made no sound even as she dismembered it actually disturbed her; then she saw that the tentacles were already growing back.
She had no idea what Shadow was doing and had no time to find out. The monster was backing her slowly into the room, and she was cornered. Something wrapped around her foot-something warm and rough like an elephant's hide-and before she could react, the tentacle withdrew into the beast with a snap and pulled her foot out from under her. The force of the fall onto her behind made her teeth bite painfully into-maybe through-her tongue. She tasted blood at the same time she reversed the spin of her whip-rapier to cut the tentacle off her foot.
