Nightworld

Glaeken stood in the dark on the rim of the hole and looked down into deeper darkness.

Somewhere down there, Rasalom waited. Glaeken could feel him, sense him, smell his stink. He would not be hard to find.

But he had to hurry. A rude, insistent urgency crowded against his back, nudging him forward. In spite of it, he turned and stared back at the cone of brilliance that pinned his apartment house like a prop on a stage, at the worm of light that had trailed him from the cone. Because of it, the night things had avoided him on his trek to this spot. He almost wished they hadn't. He wished something had challenged him, blocked his path. He hungered to hurt something—to slash, cut, maim, crush under his heel, destroy.

I was free! he thought. Free!

And now he was caught again, trapped once more in the service of—what? The power he'd served had no name, had never presented a physical manifestation of itself. It was just there—and it wanted him here.

The rage seething and boiling within him was beyond anything he had ever experienced in all his many years. It was a living thing, like a berserk warrior, wild, deranged, psychotic, slavering for an object—anyone, anything on which to vent the steam of its pent-up fury. His whole body trembled as the beast within howled to be let loose.

Save it, he told himself. Save it for Rasalom.

He was sure he'd need it then. All of it.

He turned back to the pit and swung the weapon. Damn the power, but it felt good to feel good, to have his muscles and joints feel so strong and lithe, to be able to fling his arms freely in all directions, to twist and bend without stiffness and stabs of pain.

And the weapon—he hated to admit how right it felt in his grasp, but a deeper part of him remembered and responded to the heavy feel of the hilt clutched tight against his palms and fingers. The warrior in him smelled blood.

No more time to waste.

He slipped the weapon through the back of his belt, lowered himself over the edge, and began his descent.