“Who are you?” Tylar challenged.
Silence answered him.
He stepped down the passage, lifting his sword higher, a beacon in the darkness. The shine of silver slowed the roiling shadows, just at the edge of sight.
A figure stood there, more darkness than flesh.
Deeper down the passage, the blackness churned and a deep rustling of chalk on gravestones whispered to him. Tylar knew a legion waited beyond this one’s shoulder, held back more by the glint of his sword than its keen edge.
As they faced each other across the gulf, Tylar’s vision adjusted to the gloom. He discerned eyes shining back at him. They didn’t so much glow with light, but were wells of blackness deeper than any shadow. He risked another step closer. Features of pale flesh appeared out of the darkness like a skull rising out of black dirt, half hidden by masklin.
It was a knight.
One he knew.
“No…” he moaned, stumbling back, his own breath choking him.
The figure followed with a pall of black amusement.
“Perryl…”
It was his former squire, turned knight while Tylar was in exile. He had vanished from Tashijan over a year ago, believed taken for some dark rites by the Fiery Cross. But seeing what was left of Perryl here, Tylar knew his friend’s fate had taken a much darker turn.
Words reached him, whispered with the coldness of deep caverns. “I bend my knee to a new master now.”
Tylar shook his head against the voice-so like Perryl’s, yet not. The blackest corruption oiled his words.
Fired by revulsion, Tylar stabbed at the dark figure. But his blade found only shadow. The knight flowed away, raising a black sword that ate the light, a match to the daemon knight’s eyes.
“I am ghawl now,” Perryl whispered. “Flesh and death are my past.”
The black blade parried Rivenscryr as if the Godsword were mere steel. Tylar felt the hilt spasm in his grip, clenching hard on his fingers, repulsed by the black blade’s touch.
“The darkness of the naether is so much stronger than mere shadow.”
The black sword slid across Tylar’s blade and drove for his heart.
Then light flared behind Tylar, flashing like the first rays of the sun.
The brightness ate away the dark blade before it could strike his chest. The glow also shed the shadows from the daemon knight, revealing cloak and form.
Tylar thrust out with his own sword. He drove his blade through the heart of the figure that wore his friend’s face. It sank deep and cut free a shriek that pierced beyond hearing. A wash of fetid decay billowed out, shivering Tylar’s skin. At the same time, the daemon’s cloak flew open like the wings of some malevolent raven, revealing what was hidden beneath.
Horror drove Tylar back. He bore only the hilt of the Godsword now. The blade had vanished, eaten away as usual until it could be whetted again in blood.
Tylar gaped at the form beneath the cloak. Naked from neck to toe, all was laid bare-down to the bones. It was Perryl’s body, but the skin had gone translucent, allowing the sudden light to reveal what lay beneath. Where a heart should beat and organs should churn, something else had taken root. Darkness roiled, muscular and substantial, like a giant snake, pushing and kneading against the translucent skin. From the pierced wound, darkness smoked out instead of blood.
It stank of bowel and decay.
Not smoke. Gloom. The black leak of the naether into this world.
Through the pall, Perryl’s black eyes met Tylar’s for a half beat of his heart. Tylar recognized a match to his own horror, a flash of something human, a splinter of his former self. Then it was whelmed away by darkness. The cloak billowed up, sweeping over Perryl. Shadows welled against the light-and the daemon knight fled back into the deeper darkness.
To heal or to die.
Not knowing which, Tylar turned to find the young tracker two steps away, holding aloft his lamp. His savior shook from toe to crown, breathing hard.
“I-I came back for you…” Kytt gasped out. “Barrin…found Master Gerrod.”
Tylar hurried to him, gripped his shoulder, and spun him back toward the stairs. “We must get out of the darkness.”
Tylar knew that was their only defense. Flame, heat, light, warmth. All signs of life. It was all that stood between them and death.
Together, they fled up out of the bowels of Tashijan. They reached the lamplit areas of the subterranean domain. Robed figures crowded the stairs, burdened with books, satchels, and boxes. Shouts and calls echoed. Doors slammed. Gerrod had his brethren on the move. He didn’t know what story the bronze master had related, but from the panic in their eyes and the quickness of their frantic steps, he had succeeded in lighting a fire in them.
“Here!” A voice called to him from off the stairs.
Tylar spotted Barrin hunched just off the next landing. The bullhound stood guard over the prone form of Tracker Lorr. He was propped up against the wall. Gerrod and Rogger flanked him.
Rogger waved again to him, while Gerrod pinched bitter alchemies under the tracker’s nose. Lorr stirred. An arm raised to swat away the sting. From the tracker’s fingers, something fell free. A snatch of black cloth and something that glittered.
Tylar stalked to their side. “We need to get everyone aboveground. Seal off these levels.”
Rogger cast a questioning look in his direction.
Tylar, his heart still thundering in his chest, continued in a rush. “Fires. We need the entire first level of Tashijan blazing.”
Lorr groaned but failed to raise back fully to this world. A few words tumbled from his lips. “…black ghawls…”
“He needs a healer,” Gerrod said, standing. “We’ll have to use the hound to carry him the rest of the way up.”
Tylar waved to Kytt and Rogger. “Hurry.”
He returned to the stairs. He heard the commotion of the masters as they retreated upward, but he kept his attention below. Shadows swallowed the lower stairs. Tylar wove their power into his cloak.
Still, he remembered Perryl’s warning to him.
I am ghawl now. The darkness of the naether is so much stronger than mere shadow.
Tylar’s skin shivered up into pebbling gooseflesh, sensing the meaning behind the claim. Could it be? For centuries, shadows had fed the Grace of Tashijan’s knights, granting speed and cloaking their forms. But Tylar knew there was a darkness blacker than any shadow.
He pictured the smoky Gloom of the naether bleeding from Perryl’s wound. Was that what fed these daemonic knights? A darkness deeper than shadow? Were they knights born of the naether, serving as swords for the undergods in this world?
Lorr moaned behind him.
The tracker had set fire to his own flesh to repel them.
Why had he allowed them so close?
Tylar turned as Barrin shuffled back to the stairs, burdened with Lorr’s weight, guided by Kytt. Gerrod followed, expressionless behind his armor. They set off upward, following the last of the masters. If there were any of Gerrod’s brethren still holed up in their domiciles and alchemical labs, they would discover the true depths of darkness that lurked beneath their feet.
But who had birthed such a dark legion, these black ghawls?
Rogger squeezed up to Tylar on the stairs. He held forth something in his hand. “Lorr dropped this. He had been clutching it all along, burnt to the skin of his palm.”
Tylar took the strap of black cloth, weighted down with a heavy stone. He held the jewel up to the next lamp. The diamond’s facets trapped the light and reflected it back a thousandfold. It was a rare and handsome stone.
And one he recognized.
His blood chilled. Kathryn wore the same stone-though hers was only paste and artifice. Here was the true diadem that marked the castellan’s station, granted and passed from one to the next, over countless centuries. Only the chain was broken last year. The castellan before Kathryn had vanished as surely and completely as Perryl, taking this diadem with her.