To Dai Shan’s surprise, Vandar glowered at their surroundings. For some reason, he recognized the spot, and being here apparently stirred an unpleasant memory. “Open it,” he snapped.
Dai Shan briefly considered misdirection to conceal the actual procedure. After all, the trick had worked on Aoth and his compatriots. But they hadn’t expected that particular kind of treachery. Whereas, after hearing the Thayan’s story as relayed by Jet, Vandar surely was on the lookout for it.
So Dai Shan extended three fingers and made a vertical clawing motion. The act was simplicity itself, but it transformed the space beyond the archway.
Where a single passageway had extended to the limits of one’s vision, it now forked, while walls that were formerly smooth and featureless sported a wild profusion of sculpted funeral processions, wreaths, skulls, and other images of mourning and mortality. The darkness itself seemed thicker and, even to a master of shadows, subtly unquiet and malign, like the petals of a carnivorous plant waiting to close on prey. For all his dour toughness, Vandar sucked in a breath at the transformation.
Dai Shan made a second clawing motion, and the tunnel reverted. “You see?” he asked. “I promised to tend the griffon, and I did. I pledged to teach you how to unlock the undead’s hidden paths, and now I’ve done that as well. So dare I hope that the fearless champion is coming to trust me? After all, we have far more reason to join forces and seek bloody vengeance on Mario Bez than to harbor grudges against one another.”
Vandar sneered. “Open up the maze again and show me where you abandoned Cera and Jhesrhi. Then maybe I’ll start trusting you.”
Dai Shan turned his hands up. “Would that I could. But it wasn’t really I who led the ladies, Aoth, and the fey through the arch. It was one of my shadows, lamentably acting on its own initiative and with a shadow’s ruthlessness, and as soon as it entered what I take to be the peculiar demiplane before us, I lost my psychic connection to it.”
Vandar slashed at the air, and the undead’s branching tunnel reappeared. “Then we’re just going to have to hunt for the place. You keep leading the way.”
“With the utmost admiration for your zeal to aid the sunlady and the fire wizard, may I remind you once again that Jet is alone, unconscious-”
“Go!”
Dai Shan bowed slightly and headed for the arch. The air on the other side was cold and stale, and the darkness leeched the brightness from Vandar’s torch until it burned scarcely brighter than an ember.
The gloom smothered sound as well. When Vandar shouted the names of Cera and Jhesrhi, his voice seemed feeble, and the echoes died quickly despite all the stone.
The undead’s tunnels were a somber chaos of sandstone, granite, basalt, and marble, of sarcophagi inside tombs inside greater vaults. Even the most open spaces, graveyards full of worn, leaning headstones and black lakes where moored long-ships awaited lifeless passengers and the touch of a cleric’s torch, lay under arched ceilings instead of open sky.
The maze ran on and on too, branching constantly, until it came to feel impossible and vaguely nauseating that anything so seemingly artificial, so excavated, built, and sculpted, could be so vast. Finally, Dai Shan turned and, as expected, found the red spear still pointed at his torso.
“It would be prudent to turn back,” he said.
“No,” Vandar replied.
“I trust the stalwart warrior realizes how deeply I respect his devotion to his comrades. Still, we’ve found no trace of them, and your torch has burned halfway down. As it stands, we’ll need a modicum of luck to make it back to the mortal world before it dies.”
The Rashemi’s square jaw clenched. “We don’t have to make it all the way back to where we started. We saw other arches and doorways with the three scratches.”
“Which could lead anywhere. As we’ve learned, one of them stranded Captain Fezim in High Thay, and they could deposit us someplace even less convenient. I respectfully urge the valiant swordsman to think.” For once in his ignorant, brutish life.
Vandar scowled. “All right. We’ll go back for now. But I’m not giving up.”
“I never imagined you would.”
Toward the end of the trek back, Vandar’s guttering torch shed scarcely any light. At its dimmest moments, it brought no more sense to the world than the spots and swirls a man saw when he closed his eyes and pressed on the lids.
It was at such a moment that Dai Shan sensed something trailing them back in the murk where the torchlight didn’t reach. The thing was moving so silently that even Vandar’s sharp ears evidently didn’t hear it, but Dai Shan’s hard-earned kinship to darkness enabled him to detect it like a spider feeling vibration in its web.
He turned and found the annoying crimson spear still ready to spit him. “Far be it from a simple merchant,” he said, “to teach a veteran warrior his craft. Yet you might want to point that implement in the opposite direction.”
Vandar glared, but then something in Dai Shan’s voice or manner must have convinced him he ought to pay heed. He pivoted, Dai Shan stepped up beside him, and they faced the blackness together. Yet even so, their stalker nearly took them by surprise.
One moment, Dai Shan sensed it lurking beyond the torchlight. The next, it was gone, replaced by a feeling of pouncing, hurtling motion-a sensation that made no sense whatsoever, considering that no form remained to be in motion.
It took a critical instant, but then Dai Shan realized what he was perceiving. The stalker was translating itself from one patch of darkness to the next. It was magic he could perform himself when he was up to it, but he hadn’t had occasion to observe it from the outside since his youthful training with the shadow masters.
Even as a boy, he hadn’t needed his teachers to explain how to use the spell to best advantage. It had been immediately apparent to him that only a dunce would leap in front of his foes when he could spring in behind them instead.
Dai Shan spun back around to find that the stalker was indeed behind him. Its black shape was a writhing, lashing confusion in the gloom. It could have been a huge, misshapen beetle standing on its hind legs, or perhaps a giant centipede rearing up like a serpent.
Whatever its true form, if it even possessed one, it snatched with several jointed limbs simultaneously. One hooked Vandar’s neck and jerked him flailing backward.
Meanwhile, Dai Shan dodged one such attack, brushed aside another, and stopped a third by catching the skinny limb in his hands. As he started to snap it in two, the contact seared him like the touch of cold metal, and when he completed the action, the sections of broken leg stuck to his fingers. He lashed his arms and flung them loose but lost skin in the process.
More limbs reached for him. He blocked or evaded them as well, but they kept him on the defensive and held him away from the creature’s body. He rattled off words of command that would have cowed any shadow entity he’d raised up himself but had no effect on the murky thing before him.
Something on the floor made a strangled grunt of effort. He looked down and saw that the stalker had pulled Vandar off his feet, hooked him with several of its limbs, and was dragging him forward. His face a mask of fury, the Rashemi struggled to break free but, even berserk, couldn’t manage it.
Dai Shan stamped on the shadow’s limbs, breaking them. The effort made it more difficult to defend against attacks directed at himself, and after another moment, one such snagged his thigh, and the curved claw at the end of the stalker’s arm caught in his flesh. Dai Shan reached to yank it out, and a different thin, articulated limb hooked his wrist.
At the same instant, Vandar bellowed and surged up off the floor. With all the momentum of its brawny, lunging wielder behind it, the red spear plunged through the whipping, snatching, raking limbs to pierce the murky form from which they emanated.