When the first flame arose, he used it to light the candle stub some dead man had carried.
He held it before him and there were shadows.
He set it upon the ground, and he knew that his shadow lay upon the boulder now.
What are you doing, dinner?
Jack rested in his gray realm, his head clear once more, the old, familiar tingle beginning in his fingertips and toes.
I am the stone who gets blood from men! Answer me! What are you doing?
The candle flickered, the shadows caressed him. He placed his right hand upon his left shoulder and the tingling entered there and the numbness departed. Then, wrapping himself in shadows, he rose to his feet.
"Doing?" he said. "No. Done. You have been my guest. Now I feel it only fair that you reciprocate."
He moved away from the boulder and turned to face it. It reached out for him as it had before, but this time he moved his arms and the shadows played upon its surface. He extended his being into the twisting kaleidoscopic pattern he had created.
Where are you?
"Everywhere," he said. "Nowhere."
Then he sheathed his blade and returned to the boulder. As the candle was but a stub, he knew that he must act quickly. He placed the palms of his hands upon the spongy surface.
"Here I am," he said.
Unlike the other darkside Lords, whose places of power were fixed geographical localities where they reigned supreme, Jack's was more a tenuous one, and liable to speedy cancellation, but it existed wherever light and objects met to make a lesser darkness.
With the lesser darkness about him, Jack placed his will upon the boulder.
There was, of course, resistance as he reversed their previous roles. The power that had compelled him fought back, became the victim itself. Within himself, Jack stimulated the hunger, the open space, the vacuum. The current, the drain, the pull was reversed.
...And he fed.
You may not do this to me. You are a thing.
But Jack laughed and grew stronger as its resistance ebbed. Soon it was unable even to protest.
Before the candle bloomed brightly and died, the mosses had turned brown and the glow had departed. Whatever had once lived there lived no longer.
Jack wiped his hands on his cloak, many times, before he departed the valley.
3
THE STRENGTH HE had gathered sustained him for a long while, and Jack hoped that soon he might quit the stinking realm. The temperature did not diminish further, and there came one light rainfall as he was preparing to sleep. He huddled beside a rock and drew his cloak over his head. It did not protect him completely, but he laughed even as the waters reached his skin. It was the first rainfall he had felt since Glyve.
Later, there were sufficient pools and puddles for him to clean himself as well as to drink and to refill his flask. He continued on rather than sleep, so his garments might dry more quickly.
It brushed past his face so rapidly that he barely had time to react. It happened as he
neared a shattered tower that a piece of the darkness broke away and dropped toward him, moving in a rapid, winding way.
He did not have sufficient time to draw his blade. It passed his face and darted away. He managed to hurl all three stones which he carried before it was out of sight, coming close to hitting it with the second one. Then he bowed his head and cursed for a full half-minute. It had been a bat.
Wishing for shadows, he began to run.
There were many broken towers upon the plain, and one at the mouth of a pass led between high hills and into the range of mountains they faced. Because Jack did not like passing near structures-ruined or otherwise-which might house enemies, he attempted to skirt it at as great a distance as possible.
He had passed it and was drawing near the cleft when he heard his name called out.
"Jack! My Shadowjack!" came the cry. "It's you! It really is!"
He spun to face the direction from which the words had come, his hand on the hilt of his blade.
"Nay! Nay, my Jackie! You need no swords with old Rosie!"
He almost missed her, so motionless did she stand: a crone, dressed in black, leaning upon a staff, a broken wall at her back.
"How is it that you know my name?" he finally asked.
"Have you forgotten me, darlin' Jack? Forgotten me? Say you haven't..."
He studied the bent form with its nest of white and gray hair.
A broken mop, he thought. She reminds me of a broken mop.
Yet...
There was something familiar about her He could not say what.
He let his hand drop from the weapon. He moved toward her.
"Rosie?"
No. I could not be...
He drew very near. Finally, he was staring down, looking into her eyes.
"Say you remember, Jack."
"I remember," he said.
And he did.
"...Rosalie, at the Sign of the Burning Pestle, on the coach road near the ocean. But that was so long ago, and in Twilight..."
"Yes," she said. "It was so long ago and so far away. But I never forgot you, Jack. Of all the men that tavern girl met, she remembered you the best. -What has become of you, Jack?"
"Ah, my Rosalie! I was beheaded-wrong fully, I hasten to add-and I am just now re turning from Glyve.-But what of you? You're not a darksider. You're mortal. What are you doing in the horrid realm of Drekkheim?"
"I am the Wise Woman of the Eastern Marches, Jack. I'll admit I was not very wise in my youth-to be taken in by your ready smile and your promises-but I learned better as I grew older. I nursed an old bawd in her failing years and she taught me something of the Art. When I learned the Baron had need of a Wise Woman to guard this passage to his kingdom, I came and swore allegiance to him. 'Tis said he is a wicked man, but he has always been good to old Rosie. Better than most she's known.-It is good that you remembered me."
Then she produced a cloth parcel from beneath her cloak, unfastened it and spread it open upon the ground.
"Sit and break bread with me, Jack," she said. "It will be like old times."
He removed his sword belt and seated himself across the cloth from her.
"It's been a long while since you ate the living stone," she said; and she passed him bread and a piece of dried meat. "So I know that you are hungry."
"How is it that you know of my encounter with the stone?"
"I am, as I said, a Wise Woman-in the technical sense of the term. I did not know it was your doing, but I knew that the stone had been destroyed. This is the reason I patrol this place for the Baron. I keep aware of all that occurs and of all who pass this way. I report these things to him."
"Oh," said Jack.
"There must have been something to all your boasting-that you were not a mere darksider, but a Lord, a Power, albeit a poor one," she said. "For all my figuring has told me that only one such could have eaten the red rock. You were not just jesting then when you boasted to that poor girl about that thing. Other things, perhaps, but not that thing..."
"What other things?" he asked.
"Things such as saying you would come back for her one day and take her to dwell with you in Shadow Guard, that castle no man has ever set eyes upon. You told her that, and she waited many years. Then one night an old bawd took ill at the inn. The young girl-who was no longer a young girl-had her future to think about. She made a bargain to team a better trade."
Jack was silent for a time, staring at the ground. He swallowed the bread he had been chewing, then, "I went back," he said. "I went back, and no one even remembered my Rosalie. Everything was changed. All the people were different. I went away again."