Dawn of Night

CHAPTER 6 THE DEAD OF NIGHT

The air grew darker as they neared the cemetery. It felt almost too thick to breathe, almost viscous. The buildings grew more and more blasted as they closed on the necropolis's perimeter wall. It looked to Jak as though the eye of an unimaginable storm had sat over the cemetery, leaving it in calm even while destroying the rest of the city.

Jak's bluelight wand illuminated little more than five paces. With each step, the sensation of being watched grew stronger in the halfling. The rain had grown colder.

Jak realized that the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. He took out his holy symbol and held it in the same hand as the blue-light wand.

"Strange to have a cemetery in the middle of town," Magadon observed.

"Originally, it was a commons," Cale replied over the rain. "In the final years, the inhabitants converted it to this. They wanted a cemetery within the walls, to keep their dead close. They thought that would keep them from rising. After the darkness had consumed them all, Kesson Rel returned and opened a gate in the midst of the graves. He wanted to taunt the dead with a means of escape that they could never avail themselves of."

Jak didn't bother to ask how Cale knew what he knew.

"A gate? he asked.

For a moment, Cale looked as though he had surprised himself.

He nodded and said, "Yes. The light is a gate. But I. . . I can't remember to where it leads."

Jak accepted that and kept moving.

Before them stood the low, crumbling stone wall of the cemetery. Jak felt as though that weatherworn wall demarcated more than merely the borders of the graveyard. Beyond the wall was a large expanse, overgrown with weeds, trees and tall grass, and dotted with densely-packed crypts and statuary.

They walked between two obelisks-the metal gate that once joined them lay twisted and broken nearby- and entered. It seemed to Jak that things went quieter the moment he passed through the gate.

To Jak's eye, all of the crypts appeared roughly similar-small, rectangular mausoleums of cut stone with pitched tops-though they varied in size and detail work. Most would have housed several dead, families perhaps. All had writing engraved into their face and tops, a jagged script that was faded and alien to Jak. Most had at least one statue of a winged woman on them, no doubt Elgrin Fau's patron goddess of the afterlife. Typically, she perched at the apex of the roof over the sealed door of the crypt, though she sometimes flanked the doors. Sometimes she cradled a body in her arms, and sometimes she was empty-handed.

Jak was amazed at the amount of resources the people of the city had committed to burial.

As they moved deeper into the graveyard, a fog began to form around their feet-a soup of gray mist and dark shadows. The rain slowed to a drizzle, then finally stopped. Even the thunder went quiet. The atmosphere seemed pensive, ominous.

Magadon called frequent halts, as though he saw or heard something, but then restarted the march. Jak heard nothing unusual, though his head felt muzzy. The wet must have been getting to him, but he forced himself forward.

The necropolis seemed to go on forever and fatigue gradually took its toll. Jak's legs hung from his hips like tree trunks. His vision began to grow blurry. How long had they been walking? He'd been too long on that dark plane and it was draining him.

In his dazed state, the halfling imagined deformed faces forming and dispersing in the wispy shadows that clung to their ankles and hid their feet. He shook his head frequently to clear it. The waist high shadow fog was everywhere. But hadn't it only been at his knees moments ago?

Jak couldn't see more than three paces in any direction. He was so tired that he felt as though the fog was clutching at him, turning him, forcing him to go only one way.

Magadon stopped, looked around at the crypts, and said in a whisper, "We're walking in circles." When his companions said nothing, the guide shook his head and said it again, more loudly. "We are walking in circles."

His voice sounded muted in the fog, deadened.

For a moment, it was as though no one other than Magadon could speak. It took several heartbeats for the guide's meaning to register with Jak. When it did, Jak could not fathom how the guide could have determined what he claimed. The crypts all looked the same to Jak, the trees, the grass. But Magadon knew what he knew.

At last, Cale asked in a dull voice, "Are you certain?"

"Yes," Magadon said, but then shook his head in confusion. "No."

"It's the shadows," Jak managed to say, and his tongue felt thick and unwieldy. "The fog."

Somehow the shadow fog had dulled their perception, had begun to siphon away their vitality.

The realization itself helped to clear Jak's head. It was as if a spell had been broken. His companions too seemed to recover. Gradually, each began to blink away the torpor and looked around with a more alert expression. The world suddenly came back to life and motion. Jak realized that the rain was still falling. It had never stopped! Thunder rolled in the distance. Jak felt as though he was awakening from a dream, or a three-night ale binge. He was so cold that his teeth were chattering.

"What in the Hells just happened?" Riven growled.

Though the magical effect of the shadow fog appeared to have diminished, the fog itself still enshrouded them. Jak's bluelight wand barely penetrated it. The tombs nearby faded into nothingness in its swirl of gray and ink. Tendrils of a deeper darkness ran through the mist and whirled around their legs and torsos like living things, pawing at their boots, steering them-

Steering them.

Jak took a step to his right and found that the shadows resisted him, then gently pulled him forward. His heart hammered.

"Light, Magadon!" he said over the rain. "Anything you have! Now!"

Jak didn't wait for the guide to respond. He quickly mouthed the words to a temporary light spell and focused it on the end of his bluelight wand. A globe of radiance took shape at the wand's tip. Magadon too acted quickly-almost simultaneously with the completion of Jak's spell-and a nimbus of white light flashed around the guide's head and a ball of white fire formed in the air above him, adding its own luminescence to that of Jak's spell.

The fog tendrils that had coiled around their bodies jerked backward from the sudden radiance, like a hand that had grasped a hot kettle. A palpable tremor rippled through the haze, and for a few heartbeats the light knifed through the otherwise impenetrable darkness and fog.

In that combined flash of light, Jak saw that the tendrils within the shadow fog were composed of a network of red and black veins, each as fine as a child's hair, each slowly pulsing. Just as that registered, a horrifying chorus of unearthly moans answered the light from behind them. The sound sent a chill down Jak's spine. He whirled around-

"Dark and empty!" he oathed.

Under cover of the fog and the mind-numbing spell, a host of dark figures had assembled behind them. They had gathered in an arc perhaps thirty paces away, some on the ground, others hovering in the air. Each was a roughly man-shaped outline of darkness, black as pitch, with coal red eyes that flared from the inky holes of their heads. A wave of cold went before them like a Deepwinter gale. Behind the assembled mass of undead, Jak could see more and more of the creatures rising from the mausoleums. They passed through the walls and roofs of the tombs as easily as if it was open air. It reminded Jak of black smoke issuing from chimneys. There had to be hundreds.

"Wraiths!" Cale said, brandishing Weaveshear.

Riven dropped into a fighting crouch beside him, sabers bare. Magadon knocked an arrow and drew. Jak knew that blades and arrows would be of little use against so many undead, so he did the only thing he could.

Before Magadon could fire, and before the wraiths could swarm forward, he leaped in front of his comrades, stared into the unholy eyes of the army of wraiths, and held forth his holy symbol.

"Back to your pits, creatures!" he commanded as he drew on the grace of the Trickster.

The power of Brandobaris suffused him and a dim luminescence flared from his jeweled pendant. For an instant, Jak felt more than mortal.

A symphony of hate-filled hisses answered his rebuke, but only a handful of the wraiths recoiled and fled back into their tombs. Among the rest, red eyes flared brighter and fixed their deadly gaze on Jak. Jak could feel their evil, their anger, washing over him like a chill wind. He kept his holy symbol in hand and continued to channel the Trickster's energy. Perhaps he could keep them from overwhelming him and his companions, at least for a time.

The dark army continued to assemble, like crows convening over a corpse. Red eyes burned hate into Jak. Dark bodies and darker souls strained against the divine resistance he offered through his holy symbol.

"Jak?" Magadon asked.

Straining against the wraiths, Jak could only offer a nod.

"Keep moving," Magadon said, backing deeper into the crypts while still holding his aim at the cloud of wraiths.

Riven and Cale followed the guide, with Jak bringing up the rear.

The moment Jak moved, the dark creatures moved with him, pressed against the power he was channeling. The strain of resisting the will of so many undead was wearing on him. He felt as if he was trying to hold a door shut against a hill giant. The glow from his holy symbol had diminished. He knew he could not last much longer.

"Cale!" he called in desperation, then remembered that Cale did not have his holy symbol. Without it, Cale could not affect undead.

But then Cale was beside him, with him, wearing a silken black mask.

"Right here, little man," Cale said, then he called out to the Shadowlord for power.

Jak had no time to consider how or when his friend had obtained a new holy symbol. Cale held Weaveshear before him like a talisman and the dark blade flared with ochre light.

"Back to your rest, dead of Elgrin Fau!" Cale commanded, in a voice not devoid of sympathy.

Again, the wraiths moaned, a few dissipated into nothingness, and another handful fled back to their crypts. But the bulk of them continued to advance. Still, Cale and Jak together managed at least to hold them at bay.

"Too many!" Cale called over his shoulder. "We can only slow them. Move. Move!"

Magadon fired an arrow into the mass of wraiths, then another. Jak couldn't tell if the shots had any effect on the incorporeal undead.

"Where to?" the guide asked.

"The gate," Jak said, looking over his shoulder. "There!"

He nodded in the direction of the center of the necropolis, where a flash of golden light temporarily blazed through the darkness.

Abruptly, Jak's light spell and Magadon's mental manifestation ended. Except for the dim light of Jak's bluelight wand, darkness again descended. Jak could see clearly only a few paces. The glowing coals of the wraiths' eyes behind them looked like the campfires of an army. They moaned and surged forward.

"Go now!" Cale shouted.

Magadon and Riven ran full out for the center of the cemetery, pushing their way through the fog that still resisted them. Cale and Jak followed as best they could while backstepping, continuing to slow the advance of the wraiths by channeling the power of their respective deities.

Through gritted teeth, Cale said to Jak, "They could break us if they pushed all at once."

Sweating and gasping, Jak replied, "But they aren't. Maybe they can't."

"Maybe," Cale said. Over his shoulder, he shouted to Magadon and Riven, "If they wanted to attack, they could have already. We're being herded. Stand ready."

"Are you certain?" Magadon said as he turned and fired an arrow, then another and another.

Cale could only nod, and Jak could only agree. The wraiths were holding back, waiting for a more opportune moment to attack.

Jak heard Riven spit, and heard the tell-tale whistle of the assassin's sabers whirling through the air.

"Something else wants the first bite, eh?" Riven chuckled darkly then added, "Whatever it is, it damned well better be hungry."