City of Hawks (22 page)

The pain was soul-wrenching. Gord tried to scream it away, but his throat was constricted. Then his heart stopped, and total blackness washed over him. The last thing he remembered was reaching for the great opal, intending to throw it over the wall so that the foul priest would never regain it, but he acted too late. He got it into his hand, but then the ray of death washed over him, his arm refused to obey, and then he felt nothing.

A flare of green light enveloped the body, nearly blinding the priest and anyone else who happened to be looking in that direction, as the would-be escapee fell lifeless to the ground. The great cleric of Nerull shook his head to clear his vision, crying, “Hurry, dogs! Bring me that body! I am not through yet!”

A score of lesser clerics and guards scuttled to obey. Flaring torches made the yard surrounding the temple into a scene straight from the hells, but there was no other way. Cleric-cast illumination would alert all of Dyvers that something serious was amiss at Nerull’s great house, and that was unallowable. Several of the group surrounding the area where the intruder had fallen detached themselves and came slowly back toward their master.

“Hurry, run! I command it!” There was no instant response, but finally one of the men shuffled forward to stand before the high cleric, saying: “I… we can find no body, master. There is but a scorched outline where the swine fell dead. Perhaps your power burned him to nothingness!”

The bald-pated chief priest scowled and struck the underling across his cringing face. “Bah! Look further! Take all night if necessary, but do not come into my presence again without the corpse of that man!” Then the cleric retired into his temple’s safe confines.

Although the matter wasn’t entirely forgotten, the search for the body was abandoned at dawn an hour later. After all, reasoned the priest, perhaps his curse had indeed blasted the fellow. What other explanation could there be?

“Get up. You are not dead.”

“Yes, I am. Leave me in peace.”

The toneless voice continued, not bothering to point out the contradiction, the impossibility of someone dead being able to converse. “You are not dead. You will arise.”

“No!” The voice was beginning to annoy him, and with irritation came added strength to resist. “I am dead! I will do nothing but remain so.”

“Get up. You are not dead.”

That did it. Gord would show this monotonous know-it-all a thing or two! He sprang erect suddenly, hands reaching for his weapons. A flash of pain sent him reeling-his right arm was fine, but his left was injured. Gord looked and saw a stub sticking from the gray flesh of his bicep. A broken crossbow bolt was causing the severe pain. How in the hells had that happened?

“Go to Shadowhall now and-” The toneless voice stopped in mid-sentence.

Gord looked up. The sound issued from a shapeless thing of black, a seemingly formless coalescence of shadows that floated nearby. As he peered at the phenomenon, Gord inadvertently raised his right hand toward his injured left arm. This movement partially exposed what he held clenched in his fist, and at the sight of it the shadowy thing recoiled, wafting back as if afraid.

“Shadowfire!” it said. Somehow the lifeless voice carried a note of awe in it.

Now Gord looked down, wondering what the strange being was going on about. He saw a glimmering in his own hand, a play of blackness interspersed with motes of deep green, all made vivid by what seemed a tongue of flame that appeared and disappeared within the great gem’s heart. What the dancing devas was this?

“This?” Gord inquired, thrusting the orb out toward the thing of shadows as he spoke.

Now the creature jerked backward as if yanked by a rope. Fully twenty feet rearward it flew before it came to a shuddering halt. “No!” the shadowy speaker intoned loudly. “Keep it from me and I will not tell the master anything about you,” the creature called as if pleading.

Gord sat down on the silvery-black grass, feeling tired and weak. The black thing remained distant, but Gord was not satisfied at all. “What are you talking about? Who is the master? Where are we? What do you mean, I’m not dead?”

As he addressed the thing of shadows, Gord had placed the massive black opal in a pouch. Noting this, the creature again drifted nearer as it replied. “I speak of your half-existence, once-man. The master I speak of is the lord of this place, Shadowrealm, the place where we both must dwell eternally. You thought yourself dead… I read the thoughts plainly for a time. You are not, of course, nor are you un-dead. You are in Shadowrealm, so you are half-living, half-dead, neither and both.”

The lack of intonation, the flatness and droning quality of the thing’s voice, made Gord grind his teeth. He did not like the creature, whatever it might be. “What are you? Where is this so-called master of yours?” He stressed the last word of the second question in order to let the dull monstrosity know that what it considered to be its lord did not affect Gord’s status.

“I am important. Don’t you recognize an adumbrate when you see one?”

“Don’t answer a question with another,” Gord admonished the black, formless thing, “and pay attention too! I also asked where your lord was.”

Now the thing somehow managed to sniff, and the mass of shadows grew thicker and distended, as if it were drawing itself up. “His Umbrageous Majesty, the Lord of Murk, is my master-and yours too, now that you are consigned to Shadowrealm. His Gloominess just happens to be nearby at this very moment, for the Chiaroscuro Palace is readying for the Great Celebration.”

The self-proclaimed adumbrate had continued approaching as it spoke. While its toneless voice betrayed virtually no emotion, the posture the inky monster assumed, if such could be determined in a creature like this, seemed to indicate extreme hostility. Gord read it as a desire to attack and harm him, so he reacted accordingly. As the thick clot of shadows wafted nearer, the young adventurer gathered his strength and sprang to his feet. His sword’s short blade rasped forth even as he gained his footing, and the silvery steel darted out to come within a foot of the creature.

With a sound like wind stirring dead leaves, the adumbrate darted aside from the threatening point, little streaks of silvery light arcing within its body as if the thing were a miniature stormcloud filled with lightning. “So, manling,” it now boomed, its voice taking on a tinge of emotion. “You think to threaten me with a mortal blade?” Still venting the dusty, stirring sound, It shot a short distance sideways, then came toward Gord as if to envelop him.

The sword seemed to react of its own volition. One moment it was elsewhere, the next it was a bar before the adumbrate’s near-lightning advance. The glistening metal seemed to glow, become molten, as the thing of shadows touched it. Gord felt a shivering surge of force flow up his arm as the blade contacted the creature. There was a rush, the sound of a gust of wind venting down a chimney, and a faint, nearly indiscernible keening. Then his sword was plain metal again and the thing was gone. “Good riddance,” Gord murmured, giving his full attention to his wounded arm once again.

Withdrawing the shaft was painful, but Gord knew it had to come out, and he managed to endure the hurt. A gush of black-looking blood came from the wound as the wooden shaft was pulled free. Then Gord clamped a clean strip of cloth from his shirt against both sides of the bicep, slowly winding it to make a tight binding around the injury. It wasn’t pretty, and the cloth already showed dark stains of blood, but Gord thought the bandage would suffice. He had taken far worse wounds and still lived to speak of them.

As he rested and regained his strength, Gord rummaged around in his belongings, trying to find a small flask of spirits he was sure he had tucked away somewhere, and also to see what else he had. Perhaps something he carried would jog his memory. As it was, the young man had absolutely no recollection of how he had come to this… this Shadowrealm, as the now-vanished and presumably dead adumbrate had identified this place.

It certainly wasn’t home. Gord glanced around and saw nothing that even vaguely reminded him of Oerth, let alone Greyhawk. The sky was a velvety canopy the color of old charcoal. There were spots in It all right, but they were gleaming points of black, and a sphere of deep metallic hue cast a faint, mercuric light upon the world over which it floated. The world, Gord noted, was of all blacks and grays. There seemed to be vegetation, grass and trees, bushes and flowers too, all of dun coloration, some opalescent, some actually translucent. Furthermore, the landscape seemed to be a dance of shadows that shifted and flowed almost as if he were ambling through it rather than sitting quietly observing the scene. “Shadowrealm indeed!” he muttered to himself as he went back to examining his belongings for some clue.

The huge opal that the creature had called… Shadowfire? An appropriate name… was not of help. Neither was the small heap of gem-studded jewelry Gord discovered secreted here and about his person and in his old pouch. Nothing else helped, but eventually he located the silver flask and took a healthy swig from it, shuddering as the fiery liquid burned its way over his tongue, down his throat, and into his gut. Feeling better, Gord steeled himself and poured about half of the remainder of the flask’s contents on the rag that bound his arm. That burned worse still, but at least the stuff was cleansing the outer portions of the wound. The bleeding had certainly taken care of the inner part, Gord thought. One more jot for himself, and the nearly empty flask was tucked away again along with the rest of his gear.

Now, back to the other matters at hand. He knew who he was-that was no problem. But where he was, why he was here, and what had recently happened in his life still remained unknown to Gord. Was there some place he could find to refresh himself and rest? He stood up and carefully examined the surrounding terrain, letting his gaze sweep from near to far, scanning outward in segments, until the whole of this shadowy place that surrounded him had been viewed.

Now that he was somewhat used to the place, Gord could detect traces of color. There were hints of purple, suggestions of brown, deep ultramarine, and some hue like verdigris, only darker and more intense. His eye caught pearlescence, opalescence, brilliancies, and iridescence in the blacks and grays of the place that did not exist elsewhere. Black was no longer just black; the word legitimately could be used to describe a dozen sorts of colors so subtle in difference that the eye could scarcely discern them unless one concentrated. Grays were twice as varied, even if the many metallic sheens and crystalline permutations were discounted.

“It moves!” Gord exclaimed aloud. In his examination of the strange world around him, he had become so absorbed in the minutiae of things that the larger scope had escaped him for several minutes. When he suddenly realized that a low hummock in the distance that had been in front of him was now off to the right and somewhat behind him, Gord understood that the seeming play of shadows in the place was more than that. The terrain actually flowed as if it were a vast, shadowy river.

“Yet this place I stand on does not move,” he murmured to himself, continuing to speak aloud because the sound gave him a sense of security in this strange land. “Let’s see what occurs when I move elsewhere,” he said softly, and then he left the spot he had been resting upon and trudged through the shadows and the tall, black grass to the mound he had observed earlier. He sat atop it for a time, observing the scene. The hillock became a stationary islet, while all else drifted away or across his field of vision. Eventually Gord tired of the experiment and decided this place was as good as any to rest in. He curled up under a low bush with leaves of jet that hid him from casual view, and despite the strangeness and possible dangers was soon in a state of blissful sleep.

A susurration awakened Gord from his rest. Even a slight sound was sufficient to arouse him from deepest slumber, and in strange surroundings, the young thief slept even more lightly than usual. The sound disturbed him, alerting his senses on a primeval level. Without moving, Gord opened his eyelids a crack and peered out between the long, shiny-black fronds that screened him. What he observed was sufficient to cause him to grab his sword and spring to his feet, ready to fight for his life. Once he was clear of the ebon shrub and erect, the scene was far more startling. Gord was fully ringed by a circle of creatures, the strangest collection of beings that he had ever witnessed assembled in a single place.

He immediately recognized several of the congealed-shadow things he now identified as adumbrates. These were scattered here and there among a throng of other shadowy creatures-things with faintly glowing eyes that resembled snakes, men, hounds, badgers, moths, owls, elk, and a host of other, unidentifiable forms as well, all facing the hummock he was upon and looking toward him. Gord’s eye fell upon a huge, maned lion, one of umbral mane and penumbral body, with silvery eyes that gazed back at him without winking.

“Go, friend, and take all of your kind with you,” Gord said to the weird cat. “I have no desire to harm you.” To his surprise, the monstrous creature turned and bounded off, and when he did so, shadowy shapes similar to that of the huge male shadow-lion likewise left the strange circle for parts unknown.

“You are a nonesuch!” a murky form said from behind him-too close behind!

Gord spun to confront the speaker, sword ready. A man-shape of somber tones and insubstantial form drew back as the sword of magical metal neared it. “And so are you,” Gord retorted. “Come not near, or I shall have to send you to some yet-darker plane!”

There was another shushing sound, collectively from the strange assemblage of creatures, individually voiced by the murky man-shadow. “Brash!” the form hissed in a rustling shadow-voice that Gord had grown to expect now. “Never threaten… especially what might be beyond your power to perform.”

The leaden eyes of the shadowy figure searched Gord’s face, and, detecting uncertainty, the thing smiled at him, a translucent yawning that showed gray teeth and the suggestion of what was behind at the same time. “But be at ease, stranger, for unlike the others, I have come to assist and befriend you, not seeking any special gain.”

Of course, such a statement put Gord on instant alert. “Why is that, man of shadow?” he inquired calmly but cautiously.

“Shadow? Nay, though there be some here,” the dusky form replied. “I am Smirtch, the Gloam Imprimus… Is that not sufficient reason for my special accommodation?”

“Shadow, shade, or spirit-what matter?”

“Are you of dwarven ilk? Or giantish?” rejoined the shadow-figure. “As readily as you deny such heritage, so too know that there are those named shadow or spirit, shade or phantom, who are as different, one from the other, as pixie and ogre are in the world that was once yours.”

This piqued Gord’s interest, disarming him slightly and confusing him considerably. “Ever since I awoke from what I thought was death to find myself in this odd place, I have had questions answered with queries, riddles with conundrums. I will bargain with you then, Smirtch-the-Gloam. You may remain close and converse with me without threat, but you must pledge two things.”

“Two? Pray speak fully, for no oath can be made without full disclosure of the terms and conditions of such a binding act.”

Relieved, Gord named his conditions. “First, you must swear that you will not attempt to harm me… or cause another to do so.”

“Agreed, readily accepted,” Smirtch said eagerly.

“Second, you must answer each question I ask honestly and fully, without any misleading or confusing elements in such answers.”

Smirtch shook his inky locks at that. “Not so fast, stranger. You demand much and offer naught save nonaggression. I will gladly agree to answer your questions, but in return you must likewise consent to answer those I might have of you.”

“That sounds acceptable,” Gord said after a brief pause to consider the ramifications of the pact. “But what of these others? This benighted bestiary of shadow-creatures?”