Better, then, to continue waiting. He could only guess what might happen if he tried to step one way or another while passing through a conjunction-would he come out someplace different than he should? Stay lost in the darkness forever? Vanish into oblivion? All these possibilities seemed disastrous. Moreover, even if the wine woman had disappeared down a. side passage, she would be long gone by now. He could only hope that, just as this conjunction differed from the first in duration of crossing, it also differed in not expelling gouts of flame when someone stepped through.
Still, the Amnesian Hero saw no need to stand about in tomb-like darkness. He pulled that star-forged sword from its scabbard and held the blade aloft.
"Starlight cleave the night," he commanded.
A brilliant blue radiance burst from the tip, creating a small globe that bathed the area in an eerie sapphire light. After the long darkness, the sudden illumination hurt the Thrasson's eyes, and he was still trying to blink away his blindness when he perceived a woman-sized shape slipping from the brightened circle.
"Wait, I beg you!"
Eyes half shut, the Amnesian Hero started after the fleeing figure and found himself clumping down a narrow dirt lane. A row of windowless mud brick tenements bordered the street on each side, their open doorways as still and black as a conjunction square. The Thrasson cursed himself for a berk, wondering how long he had been standing about in the dark thinking himself caught between mazes. It was a wonder the wine woman had still been near when he lit his sword.
"Please… wait!" he gasped. "I'm too… sick to keep this… up."
The Amnesian Hero clumped past an intersection and saw, out of the corner of his eye, the woman's figure turning to flee. In the blue light, her gown looked more gray than white, and her shoulders seemed somewhat more hunched than he remembered, but there was no time to ponder the differences. The Thrasson lurched into the alley and lunged out to catch hold of her.
Her shoulder seemed soft and spongy, and the cloth covering it had the dusty, brittle feel of ancient linen. The gown was no longer belted at the waist, but hung like a sack, dingy and stained, down past her knees. In the sword's blue light, her hair looked colorless and drab; it was also stiff as straw, and so thin it barely concealed her red-blotched scalp.
"Lady? Is that… you?"
The woman's only reply was to lean forward and try to pull away. The Amnesian Hero squeezed her shoulder – then groaned in disgust as her flesh erupted beneath his grasp. A foul, too-sweet stench filled the air, and a warm, slimy fluid coated his fingertips. He pulled his arm away, still holding a handful of moldering cloth and some brownish stuff that had probably once been flesh.
The Amnesian Hero gawked at his hand. "I…" He could not think of the words to apologize. "Lady, please forgive my clumsiness! I meant no harm."
"What did you mean?" The woman's voice was haggard. She spun on the Thrasson, raising a lumpy, gnarled mass at the end of a scaly arm. She extended her index finger, all that remained on the hand, and pointed at her head. "To look on this? Is that what you meant?"
The Amnesian Hero stmggled not to retch. The woman's face was a sagging mass of folded flesh and festering boils, so grotesquely misshapen that it scarcely looked human. A pair of black marbles peered out from beneath a puffy brow, while her nose had vanished – nostrils and all – into an enormous dark nodule that had taken over the middle of her face. Only her mouth, an enormous gash rimmed by red, cracked lips, remotely resembled its original form.
"I… I beg your… pardon.* The Amnesian Hero suddenly felt very weak and braced his ichor-covered hand against a wall. Twice had he braved the Leper Cities of Acheron to rescue the Virgins of Maimara, and never had he set eyes on such a gruesome, pitiable visage. "I thought you were… I was looking for a young woman in white… Perhaps you saw her… come this way?"
"How do you know you haven't found her?" So deep and rumbling was this new voice that the Thrasson seemed to hear it in the pit of his stomach. "In this place, we all wish we were someone else."
Behind the woman appeared an enormous darkness, not creeping into the sapphire light so much as forcing back the radiance. The gloomy figure stood easily half again as tall as a man, with a torso so broad it filled most of the narrow lane. As the Amnesian Hero's eyes grew more accustomed to looking at what was essentially a darker shadow standing in the murk, he saw – or imagined he saw – two maroon eyes flashing somewhere beneath a set of wickedly curved horns. Behind the creature's broad shoulders, there seemed to be a pair of folded wings that rose a good six feet above its head and ended there in two bony hooks.
The newcomer leaned over the woman, bringing his head toward the glowing sword and highlighting the curved horns and maroon eyes the Amnesian Hero had noticed earlier. Even so, it was not until the dark visage actually entered the globe of light that the sapphire glow brightened its features. Hidden beneath sagging folds and black nodules similar to those covering the woman's face were the venom-dripping fangs and vaguely apelike muzzle of a great tanar'ri.
The Amnesian Hero grew suddenly as hot as steam. A distant ringing filled his ears, his vision blackened around the edges, and he felt too frail to stand. The fiend pushed his face closer, and the Thrasson had to pull back to keep from touching the brute's inflamed black lips.
"This girl you have lost, by what name is she called?" The fiend's breath reeked of cinders and rancid flesh. "Karfhud is a favorite of all the girls! Is that not so. Do-?"
The Amnesian Hero did not hear the woman's name, for the ringing in his ears had grown too loud. The darkness rushed in, sweltering and thick, then his legs went limp, and he felt himself fall.
Down he falls, down to the boundless, eternal dark, down to the black cold void where monsters hatch and slither, down to the stale hissing murk that churns like slow-boiling pitch inside us all. Were Jayk there to catch him, the fall would not feel so endless. But she is somewhere beneath a low, copper sky, lost upon a sandy path, beset by thorn brambles left and right, keeping watch on the hedge crest – with fear for me, with hope for the Thrasson – her cape hem hanging ragged where the old bariaur has torn away strips to swaddle Tessali's wrists.
And the elf: he stares, glassy-eyed and confused, at the emptiness at the ends of his wrists; his arms throb up to his shoulders, his bones ache to the core and out again – but not his hands. Those hurt not at all. He still feels them hanging from his wrists, still feels his fingers moving when he tries to make a fist, still feels his knuckles brushing the bariaur's chest as the old fellow works-but does not see them. For some reason he does not understand, they have turned invisible. He is like the ghosts who, by hiding in the shadows of things past, slip the Unbearable Moment.
He should know better.
The Bleak Cabal calls it the Grim Retreat, this taking of refuge in dark places. With every breath, Tessali draws that murk down into himself; with every breath, the gray light grows a little dimmer to his eyes. If he stays too long in the shadows, the darkness will fill him completely; he will lose himself to his blindness as surely as Jayk has – or as I might have, had I not seen the treachery of Poseidon's gift.
Before Silverwind has finished swaddling Tessali's stumps, the black bandages are soaked with blood. The weary bariaur can do nothing about it. He has already cast spells to ease the elf's pain and slow the bleeding, but he has no more healing magic until he has rested.
Tessali spreads his stumps, looks between them. "I can't see my hands." He frowns at the red drops falling from the ragged bandages; his eyes grow vacant, he looks back to Silverwind and asks, "Why can't I see my hands?"