Twilight Falling (33 page)

The rest of the gnolls hesitated, pointed, muttered. Cale didn’t need to understand their tongue to know what they said. Gez didn’t fight like a gnoll, and his wounds healed too fast.

More muttering. Still the gnolls did nothing. Cale could sense their fear.

Seeing the hesitation in the eyes of his packmates, the false Gez no longer tried to hide her true nature. She held up a hand, pointed it at Cale, and began to mouth arcane words.

Again Jak’s voice rose in answer, a counter to whatever the creature had intended. The shapeshifter’s spell fizzled in a stream of impotent black energy that leaked from her fingertips.

That was enough for the gnolls. Seeing one of their own casting spells told them all they needed to know. They backed farther away from the combat, looking to Dreeve for guidance. The gnoll leader seemed too surprised to act.

Hoping to catch the impostor off-guard, Cale lunged forward, blade low. Preternaturally quick, the shapeshifter danced backward, knocked Cale’s long sword out of position with her axe, and punched Cale in the nose. Warm blood washed down his face. Eyes watering, he stumbled backward, keeping his long sword in a defensive position as best he could.

The creature might have finished him then, but Riven bounded forward and stabbed the false gnoll through the side with both sabers, halfway to the hilts.

“Let’s see you heal that,” the assassin hissed.

The impostor’s legs buckled, and she growled in pain, but still she managed to smash the base of her axe haft into Riven’s jaw. Blood flew from the assassin’s mouth. He staggered backward and fell, leaving both blades buried in his enemy’s flesh.

The shapeshifter roared, jerked Riven’s blades free, and began to change form.

Gez’s body contorted and twisted, growing broader, more muscular. Fur shrank and vanished into leathery green skin. The head expanded while the muzzle shortened, finally exploding into a huge mouth filled with teeth. Clawed fingers and splayed feet sprouted from the elongated arms and thick legs.

That was too much for the gnolls, who had been watching the combat from a distance. As one, the pack barked its terror and began to flee back the way they had come. Even Dreeve ran.

Moments later, more shouting and the sound of metal ringing on metal sounded from the woods in the direction the gnolls had fled.

Cale and Riven, both bleeding, shared a look. What new foe was this?

They had no way to know. Cale gripped his holy symbol tightly.

The creature didn’t appear surprised by the combat happening in the woods behind her. She looked at Cale with dark eyes.

“You wished to see me, Erevis Cale,” she said. “See me now.”

With that, she leaped at him, quick as a viper, and knocked him to the ground. Her weight pushed the air from Cale’s lungs and cracked several ribs. He tried to bring his long sword to bear but she pinned his arm in a vise grip. Her other claw raked his throat—only the stiff leather collar of his armor kept him alive. He punched at her with his offhand.

With an almost casual bite, she snapped off Cale’s hand just above the wrist and devoured it whole.

Pain exploded in his brain. He screamed in agony, and thumped at her with a stump spraying blood. She tore at his chest, his arm, his throat.

From behind, Cale heard Jak exclaim in a rage, “Bitch!”

And the halfling was upon her, trying to get her off of Cale. He stabbed with his dagger and his short sword. Twice, three times he punctured her skin.

Cale was losing consciousness. He couldn’t breathe. Blood poured from his arm with each beat of his heart. Through eyes gone blurry, he watched her rake Jak across his face. The power of the blow sent the halfling sprawling to the ground.

Cale tried to speak but nothing came out.

Riven was there, shouting something, his sabers whirring. He must have retrieved them. Still she remained on top of Cale, holding Jak and the assassin at bay with claw and tooth. Cale, helpless and dying, could do nothing.

It occurred to him then: she had devoured his holy symbol. He had failed his friends—was Riven his friend?—and his god. His vision began to go dark. He gasped for breath. He tried to shift his chest free of her weight but was too weak.

Then, somehow, Jak was on her back, straddling her the way he might a horse. He was shouting, his face flushed and contorted with rage. Tears poured down his face.

As though from a great distance, Cale heard him screaming, “Die! Die!” and with each word, he stabbed her—in the side, in the throat, in the back. Again and again.

The creature roared, showing Cale a mouthful of teeth, and reared up.

Strangely, when she got off of Cale, he felt no relief. His chest still felt as though a hundredweight sat atop it. He knew then that he would die. A rib had pierced a lung. He was breathing through blood.

The creature drove Riven back, plucked Jak off of her back by the scruff of his neck, and brought him around to her face. One, twice, she cuffed him about the face. He went limp, and she opened wide her mouth.

A sabre blade burst from her chest, spraying blood. She looked at it in surprise, dropped Jak, and whirled—

—to receive a cross cut from Riven’s other sabre, clean through her throat. Her head flew from her body and her huge frame crashed to the ground, missing Cale by a handspan.

The assassin wasted no time. He spared Cale only a glance before he went to Jak and kneeled at his side. He tapped the halfling’s cheeks.

“Fleet! Godsdamnit, Fleet!”

Jak’s eyes fluttered open. Riven pulled him roughly to his feet and dragged him over to Cale. Cale tried to speak but couldn’t manage it.

“He’s dying, Fleet,” Riven said. “Heal him. Now.”

The assassin looked over his shoulder at the forest. The combat there had ceased. Or at least Cale could no longer hear it.

Jak nodded but his eyes welled. He kneeled, put his hands on Cale, and whispered a prayer to Brandobaris. Cale’s pain eased some, but his forearm continued to bleed. His lungs still barely functioned.

Jak looked him in the eyes and mouthed the words, I’m sorry.

Cale understood. Jak had used his spells to counter the creature’s spells. He had no more healing to give.

“Another, Fleet!” Riven demanded. “Another!”

Jak shook his head and muttered, “I don’t have another. It’s not enough.” His voice broke when he said that last.

Cale tried to smile but could not. He was fading.

Voices from behind.

Jak jumped to his feet with a snarl, blades in his fists. Riven too whirled around. Cale couldn’t see but he could hear:

“… tracking you for days. You missed me in Starmantle so you hire curs? They were running as though the Hells had been emptied behind them. What are—”

“Magadon,” Riven said. “Come here!”

Magadon. It took a moment for the name to register. Riven’s guide from Starmantle.

Magadon stepped forward and appeared in Cale’s sight. Clad in woodsman’s garb—weathered green cloak, calf high leather boots, broad belt and wide-brimmed hat—he looked every bit a guide. He wore a bow over his shoulder and held a long sword in his fist. He looked to the corpse of the creature beside Cale and his eyes went wide.

“Slaadi,” he said.

Riven grabbed him by the shoulder and made him look at Cale.

“Forget that,” the assassin said. “Help him.”

Shaking his head sadly, Magadon said, “He’s done for, Drasek.”

In a blink, Riven had a blade at Magadon’s throat.

“Not so,” Riven hissed. With his other blade, he pointed back across the clearing to someone that Cale couldn’t see. “Hold your ground or he dies, then you. Fleet.”

Jak, though obviously confused, interposed himself between Riven and Magadon’s comrade, blade bare.

Magadon must not be alone, Cale dimly realized. It occurred to him then that Magadon and his comrade must have been the riders who had tracked Dreeve’s pack from Starmantle.

“It’s all right, Nestor,” Magadon said over his shoulder.

“Godsdamned right,” Riven hissed. “Now do it. I’ve seen you do it before.”

Looking down at Cale, Magadon said, “He’s too far gone.”

“You better hope not. Do it!”

Cale saw the struggle on Magadon’s young, cleanshaven face. The man couldn’t have seen more than thirty winters.

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said at last.

“Yes, I do,” Riven said, and he pressed his blade into Magadon’s flesh.

The guide stared at Riven’s eye, found nothing, and slowly lowered himself beside Cale. Riven’s blade stayed at his throat the while.

“I suppose you do,” Magadon said, and grim humor tinged his voice.

Riven put his mouth next to the guide’s ear and whispered, “If he dies, you’re dead too. I don’t need a guide without him.”

At that, Magadon actually smiled.

“I see you haven’t changed, Drasek.”

He removed his hat and looked Cale in the face for the first time. Cale saw that his eyes lacked color. They were solid white except for his dark pupils. Ridiculously, those eyes called to Cale’s mind knucklebones that had just come up adder’s eyes. The most unlucky of rolls.

“This won’t hurt,” Magadon said to Cale. “Not you, anyway.”

Despite the attempt at levity, Cale heard the dread in the guide’s voice. Magadon put two fingers to Cale’s forehead and two fingers to his own. Instantly, a charge ran the length and breadth of Cale’s body and he felt his mind connect to Magadon’s, conjoin. The feeling would have frightened him had he not been so weak. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he was not his own man.

Almost as quickly as it had begun, their minds began to separate. As Magadon’s mind pulled away, he drew Cale’s pain after him. Cale’s vision cleared, ribs righted and reknit, slashes closed and sealed, and the stump of his wrist stopped bleeding.

And with each step of the healing process, the wounds that had healed in Cale manifested on Magadon. The guide groaned as his ribs shattered, and he gritted his teeth as his skin split.

The entire process took only moments.

Afterward, Cale was whole but for the stump of his hand. Magadon was ruined.

The guide collapsed beside him, eyes squeezed shut, face contorted with pain. Cale would have healed him if he had had his holy symbol. With nothing else for it, he sat up, put a comforting hand on Magadon, and looked up at Riven.

“What have you done?”

“Saved you,” Riven said unemotionally, and nodded at Magadon. “Watch.”

Cale watched, wide-eyed, as Magadon visibly gathered himself and attempted to concentrate. Before Cale’s eyes, the slashes in the guide’s flesh faded, and his ribs healed.

“Dark,” Jak whispered from behind him, watching with one eye while keeping the other on Magadon’s comrade.

Cale too was amazed. He had seen Magadon cast no healing spell.

“How?” he asked Riven.

Riven’s mouth twisted with distaste.

“Back in Selgaunt,” the assassin said. “I told you I once knew a mind mage. Now you do too.”

“Psionicist,” Magadon corrected, groaning as he lifted himself into a seated position. “Mind mage sounds ridiculous.”

Riven scoffed.

Cale helped Magadon to his feet and asked, “You healed me with your mind?”

Magadon looked him in the face with those knucklebone eyes and replied, “I established a sympathetic bond between us and took your wounds as my own. I healed myself with my mind.”

Cale absorbed that, still astounded.

“So you can only heal yourself?” he asked.

Magadon nodded.

A thought occurred to Cale and he asked, “Can you pass the wounds to another?”

A guarded look came over the guide’s face.

“Only if the other were willing,” he said. “It’s not a weapon.”

Cale considered that, nodded, and extended his remaining hand.

“I’m Erevis Cale,” he said, “and I’m in your debt.”

Magadon took his hand.

“Magadon Kest. And that,” he nodded to his comrade, a large man in studded leather armor, armed with bow and a greatsword, “is Nestor.”

The big man nodded his balding head in acknowledgement. His wide-eyed gaze lingered over the corpse of the slain creature.

Magadon went on, “Perhaps you’d consider calling off the halfling? Nestor looks intimidated.”

“Piss off,” said the big man.

“Jak,” Cale said with a smile.

The halfling sheathed his blades and gave Nestor an apologetic shrug.

For the first time, it registered that both Jak and Riven were wounded. Cale reached for his holy symbol—

And realized again that he had no holy symbol. And no hand. He looked at the stump. Strangely, it felt as though he still had a hand, as though he could still flex his fingers. He felt no pain, just loss. He looked to the corpse of the creature.

“What did you call her?” he asked Magadon.

“Her? How in the Hells would you know it was a ‘her’?”

Cale gave no answer, and Magadon shrugged.

“She’s a slaad, I think,” the guide said. “Creatures of chaos. Not of this world.” He looked at Riven. “Not enough enemies in Faerun for you, Drasek?”

Riven sneered.

Nestor, standing over the slaad’s corpse with a haunted look, poked at the body with his greatsword. Cale figured Nestor had never before seen anything like her.

“Cut her up and burn her,” Cale said. “Then we move.”

Nestor whirled on them.

“What?” he asked, horror obvious in his eyes.

“They heal,” Riven said. “Faster than a troll. It’s the only way to be certain. Fleet, start a fire. Keep it low. We don’t need the whole forest seeing it.”

Jak nodded and set to work. Afterward, while Magadon, Jak, and Nestor chopped the slaad’s body into manageable pieces, Cale pulled Riven aside.

“How well do you know him?” Cale asked, indicating Magadon.

“We go back a bit. I’d trust him as much as you. He’s been a guide out of Starmantle for years. Did some work for the Zhents years ago. His comrade is unknown to me.”

“Get him over here.”

Riven called Magadon over while Nestor and Jak put the slaad to the flames. The creature’s flesh shed greasy black smoke as it burned. It smelled like eggs gone bad. Of course, Cale knew that somewhere in the flames his holy symbol too was burning. He watched the flesh char and peel away from the bones, hoping that somewhere the flames warmed the departed souls of the Uskevren house guards she had murdered.