Twilight Falling (32 page)

Dolgan?

From somewhere to the north, Dolgan’s mental voice answered, I am here, Elura. Less than two hours behind the gnolls.

I am in the form of the gnoll creature Gez, she said to him. I will return to the pack and tell them—tell Dreeve, she corrected, referencing the information that she had stolen from Gez’s mind—that we have killed the trackers and that Nurm died in battle. Alert me when you are near. If I have not done so beforehand, upon your arrival, we will kill them all.

In the darkness, the towering cedars, pines, and elms at the edge of the Gulthmere looked as impenetrable to Cale as a siege wall. It looked … foreboding. Cale spared a glance skyward—the last time he would be able to see the stars after entering the tangle of the Gulthmere, he supposed. He wondered whether they would arrive at the Fane in time to stop Vraggen.

“We’re in time,” Jak said softly, as though reading his mind.

Cale nodded. He knew it wasn’t yet midnight. Mask allowed him to know intuitively when that hour arrived. But he didn’t think they had much more than a couple of hours.

Dreeve had recalled the perimeter scouts but Gez and Nurm had not yet returned. The remaining gnolls arranged themselves into two skirmish lines. With Cale, Jak, and Riven sandwiched between the lines, they entered the Gulthmere.

The fragrance of the pines hung thick in the air. Needles and deadwood crunched underfoot. The forest felt old.

Each step in created more and more tension in the gnoll pack. Cale could sense it, could see it in their furtive gazes, quickened respiration, and slightly raised hackles. They feared the Gulthmere. Or the Fane.

Their pace slowed markedly as the terrain forced them to pick their way through the undergrowth. Cale quickly lost his sense of direction, though he did feel the ground descending and growing softer as they progressed. He could see only two or three paces before him.

“Jak,” Cale said. “Your wand. We need light.”

Dreeve whirled on him and hissed, “No light, human! You will draw attention to us.”

The rest of the pack softly growled alarmed agreement.

“We need to be able to see,” Cale said. “This light is not visible from far off.” He looked to Jak. “Little man.”

Jak pulled out his bluelight wand and uttered, “Inil,” the word in the halfling tongue for “light”. The wand’s tip emitted a soft, blue glow. Shadows danced at the edges of the wand’s illumination.

“You see?” Cale said to Dreeve.

The gnoll captain grunted something in his own tongue that Cale felt certain was an expletive, then he turned on his heel and started off. They followed.

After a short time, the ground leveled off and the air began to feel strange: thick with moisture and something else, something oily.

“You feel that?” Jak asked Cale quietly.

Cale replied, “We’re getting close.”

Riven only grunted.

Cale called up to Dreeve, “How much farther?”

The gloom seemed to dull his voice. The shadows swallowed sound.

Dreeve said over his shoulder in a low hiss, obviously perturbed by Cale’s loud call, “Another hour—”

Abruptly, the gnoll captain dropped into a crouch. His hackles rose. His lips peeled back from his fangs. Growls sounded from the rest of the pack.

“What is it?” Cale asked in alarm, scanning the forest around them.

Beside him, Riven and Jak drew their weapons and went back to back. Jak covered his bluelight wand with his cloak.

“Something comes,” Dreeve said.

The gnoll captain hurriedly whispered orders to his pack. Several circled out wide and took cover behind the boles of trees. Others knocked arrows, took a knee, and drew. Cale followed their aim with his eyes.

Nothing but the forest and darkness.

Then he heard it: something moving through the woods, cracking twigs, crushing leaves.

The gnolls tensed. Bowstrings creaked in the darkness. Cale sank into the gloom, withdrew his holy symbol, pulled his blade, and took a step nearer Riven and Jak.

The sounds drew closer … closer. Something big.

Near Cale, Dreeve audibly sniffed at the air. After only a moment, he rose from his crouch and barked something to his pack. The rest of the gnolls immediately stood down.

“Gez,” the gnoll captain explained to Cale.

“Light, Jak,” Cale said, and the halfling unshielded his bluelight.

Gez sprinted into the clearing and stopped cold upon seeing his comrades. His tongue lolled from the side of his mouth and blood covered his cloak. The rest of the pack barked a greeting. Gez returned the greeting absently while he stalked up to Dreeve. The two held an intense conversation. The rest of the pack listened intently. Cale couldn’t read their expressions and wished again that he could understand the gnoll tongue.

When they finished, Dreeve nodded and thumped Gez on the shoulder. Gez shot Cale a hateful glance, turned, and called for a waterskin. One among the pack provided him with water while the rest swarmed around him and peppered him with questions. Dreeve approached Cale, Riven, and Jak.

“Gez and Nurm encountered your trackers and killed them both,” the gnoll said. “Gez was wounded, Nurm was killed.”

Cale was doubtful but kept it from his face. He had seen firsthand the ability of Vraggen’s agents to live through and quickly heal wounds that should have killed them. Gez might genuinely think that he and Nurm had killed the “human” trackers, but Cale thought not.

“How did they kill them?” he asked, looking past Dreeve to Gez. “What did they do with the bodies?”

Dreeve’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. His ears went flat against his head.

“They left their corpses in the grass,” Dreeve said. “Why does it matter, human? Who were these trackers?”

Cale had no intention of telling Dreeve anything. If the gnoll understood the danger, Cale knew he and his pack would abandon them.

“Who they were doesn’t matter,” Cale said. “They’re dead. Now, get us to the Moonmere. Quickly. After that, you’ll have your payment and we’ll part our ways.”

The gnoll captain sniffed the air as though he smelled the lies in the air.

“We’re not far,” Dreeve said, then he turned and returned to his pack.

Slightly more than an hour later, the drumming began. From somewhere up ahead, a deep, rhythmic beat carried through the torpid air and shook the leaves from the cedars. The gnolls whimpered amongst themselves nervously, whining and sniffing at the air.

“They’re summoning the Fane,” Jak whispered to Cale.

“Or acknowledging its arrival,” Cale said.

Eerily, the drums reminded him of a heartbeat, as though the heart of something old, huge, and dark had awakened. The air itself seemed to be vibrating. Jak’s bluelight cast more shadows than it should.

Cale called up to the gnoll, “Dreeve, we need to move more quickly.”

The rest of the gnolls cringed at the loudness of his voice. Except Gez. Gez stared at Cale with something akin to hunger in his dark eyes. Cale remembered Dreeve’s words regarding Gez—He has tasted of manflesh. Cale stared the gnoll down. Gez licked his lips, winked, and looked away.

Dreeve stalked back to Cale, obviously agitated.

“Do not raise your voice, fool human.” He looked from side to side and added, “The lake’s demons are about.”

“Then we’re near?”

Dreeve nodded and said, “Come.”

Cale, Riven, and Jak followed. The rest of the pack trailed them at several paces, ears flat and hackles up.

“This is probably as near the lake as they’ve ever been,” Jak whispered.

Cale only nodded.

Dreeve led them forward through the undergrowth. He signaled a halt near a line of stones. Intuitively, Cale knew it to be a border.

“Look,” Dreeve said, and he gestured beyond the line of stones. “Once, a large lake covered much of this area. Humans regarded it as holy. A great temple-city stood near here at the edge of the water.” He kicked the nearest stone with his foot. “Worked stone. This was a wall.”

Cale kneeled down and examined the stone. Age had left it pitted and cracked, but its sharp corners and smooth face did suggest worked stone. Perhaps a wall, perhaps something else. The area beyond the stones, while otherwise similar to the rest of the forest, looked dimmer, as though the darkness was thicker there. Jak’s bluelight seemed to be shining through fog.

“You see that?” Cale asked Jak.

The halfling nodded and kneeled beside him to run his hands over the stones. Cale withdrew his holy symbol and whispered the words to a spell that allowed him to see dweomers. The stones glowed a faint blue in his sight, as did the air beyond them.

“Magical,” he said to Jak. “The whole area. Only slightly, but it’s there.”

“Old, probably,” Jak said.

The drumbeats stopped. A cold breeze stirred the trees. Cale and Jak shared a look; they both sensed it. They were nearly out of time.

Cale leaped to his feet and said, “Dreeve, lead us to the lake. Now!”

Dreeve snarled, backed up a step, and held up his hands.

“We go no farther, human,” said the gnoll. “None of mine cross those stones. The lake is a few miles ahead, through the trees. I’ve done what you asked. Now, pay as agreed.”

The rest of the pack snarled agreement, while they eyed the forest nervously.

Cale didn’t want to waste time arguing. He figured that he, Riven, and Jak should be able to locate the Lightless Lake from there.

“Very well,” he said to Dreeve.

He reached for his belt pouch—and froze in mid-gesture.

Seven or eight paces behind Dreeve stood Gez, and the gnoll’s entire body glowed blue in Cale’s magically augmented eyes.

Their gazes locked, and in the eyes of the gnoll, in the eyes of whichever one of Vraggen’s agents had taken Gez’s form, Cale saw understanding dawn. The gnoll realized that Cale knew. Gez grinned, made a little half-curtsey, and that feminine gesture told Cale all he needed to know: it was the woman who had first invaded Stormweather Towers and taken Almor’s form.

Cale whipped free his blade and holy symbol.

Dreeve, understanding nothing, and seeing only that Cale had drawn, snarled, leaped backward, and unslung his axe.

“Cale,” Jak began.

“Treachery!” shouted Gez in Common, and he howled.

“You’ll die for this, human,” barked Dreeve, who brandished his axe.

He barked orders in his own tongue.

Behind Cale, Jak and Riven pulled their steel.

The rest of the pack, hackles up, pelted forward, goaded on by Gez.

Cale saw immediately that the situation could only go from bad to worse. Clutching his holy symbol, he whispered a hurried prayer to Mask. Impenetrable darkness cloaked the area, darkness through which only Cale could see.

The gnolls arrested their charge, but Dreeve, undeterred despite his blindness, lunged forward and swept his axe in a semicircle. Cale dodged out of reach, got behind Riven and Jak, and grabbed both by the cloaks.

“It’s me,” Cale said above the growling gnolls, to stop Riven from slicing open his chest.

He pulled both of them beyond the border stones and out of the darkness.

Rapidly, Cale said, “Gez is one of Vraggen’s shapeshifters; the female from Stormweather. Jak, stay back and counter any spell she attempts to cast. She shows that teleportation rod, incapacitate it.”

Jak shook his head and replied, “No, Cale! I—”

“This isn’t the one that hurt you, Jak,” Cale told him. “I need you to do this.”

Jak held his gaze for a moment before nodding and taking his holy symbol in his hand.

Cale turned to Riven and said, “This one doesn’t get away. Understood?”

Riven gave a hard smile and readied his sabers.

“I’ve no problem with that,” the assassin said. “Get rid of that darkness and let’s work.”

Within the globe of darkness, the gnolls, too stupid or untrained to stop moving and listen, instead snarled and hacked about with their axes. It was pure luck that they hadn’t yet killed each other. Dreeve alone maintained his calm. He stood in a defensive crouch, sniffing, and barking for quiet, but his pack did not heed. The Gez imitator edged away from the rest of the gnolls toward the left of Cale’s sphere of darkness.

“To our right,” Cale said to Riven.

Riven crouched, whirled his blades once, and said, “Do it.”

With a mental command, Cale dispelled the darkness. For a fraction of a heartbeat, the gnoll pack stood confused. Cale and Riven leaped the stones and sped past them at Gez.

The woman in Gez’s form saw them coming and her lips curled back from her teeth. Surreptitiously, she made a pass with her hand and began an incantation.

From behind, Jak’s voice rose in answer, chanting a counter spell, and when the impostor finished whatever spell she intended to cast, nothing happened.

Just a pace or two away from Gez, Riven’s voice rose and he shouted a word of power in the dire tongue Cale sometimes heard him utter in his sleep. The pronouncement caused vomit to rush up Cale’s throat, slowing him, but he swallowed it down. Gez recoiled as though struck, grimacing.

Following up on the opening, Riven bounded forward. Sabers whirled, stabbing and slashing. Gez, still partially stunned, could not parry them all and the assassin opened a gash in the false gnoll’s side and forearm. Cale lunged forward to attack from the other side, a low stab, a reverse slash, and an overhand chop. The impostor took wounds in her thigh, chest, and shoulder. She careened backward.

“Show yourself, bitch,” Cale taunted.

The wounds they had inflicted began to close. The false Gez recovered herself, grinned, and winked.

From behind them, Jak shouted, “Look at his wounds, Dreeve! See how they heal? Look! That’s not one of yours, but a shapeshifting demon from the lake!”

With surprising quickness, the impostor pounced forward and went on the attack. Spinning and ducking, she slammed her axe haft into Riven’s ribs and forced Cale backward with a flurry of vicious swings. When the false gnoll had a moment to catch her breath, she shouted something in the gnoll tongue and gestured at Cale and Riven, no doubt an attempt to convince her packmates to assist her.