A vague form moving on four legs, or perhaps six or eight, prowled out of an arched opening not twelve feet ahead of him. His heart pounding, he flattened himself against the wall. The phantom turned in the opposite direction and disappeared into the blackness.
When his nerves ceased their jangling, Kevin crept on, peeked into the archway, and finally saw the prisoners, those he had been tracking and maybe fifteen others as well.
Tilvara had probably maintained a perfectly good dungeon beneath her residence, but for some reason, the shadows had opted to hold their captives in a spacious chamber where eight or ten looms stood at regular intervals about the floor. Some still supported unfinished bits of weaving, the weft and woof rotting away and tingeing the air with the smell. The humans were still bound, but not with ropes, which lay in careless tangles on the floor. Instead, the prisoners stood enmeshed in strands of darkness, which, anchored to the back wall, floor, ceiling, and looms, were nearly invisible in the gloom.
Kevin didn't know what the black cables were made of-perhaps the same shadow-stuff as the phantoms themselves-but he assumed he would be able to cut them once he disposed of the jailer. For as best he could tell in the darkness, only one shadow lingered in the weavers' workroom, and it had its back to the door.
Kevin crept over the threshold. Evidently sensing his presence, the shadow began to turn, and he cut at it. The sword sheared into its head, and it staggered and disappeared.
The prisoners started to babble, and he frantically tried to shush them, so intent on the need for quiet that it took him a moment to take in what they were saying.
"Look up! The spider! It's right above us!"
As soon as he did understand, he looked up instantly, galvanized by a jolt of terror. He didn't like spiders, and if such a creature had spun the strands holding the captives, it must be huge.
Yet he couldn't see it. The room was too dark, and the ceiling too high. His mouth dry as sand, he pivoted back and forth, trying to spot it.
"Does anybody see it?" he asked the others. "Do you? Do you?"
Evidently they didn't. They simply knew from bitter past experience that it was there.
It occurred to Kevin that he could back out of the room and leave them to their fate. He'd tried to help them, no one could say that he hadn't. It was possible that his sword couldn't even cut the spider.
But he knew he couldn't really abandon them. It wouldn't be chivalrous. Ajandor-the old Ajandor, anyway-would never have countenanced such a selfish, craven act.
Kevin glimpsed motion from the comer of his eye. Impelled by pure reflex, he jumped to one side, and the leaping spider pounced on the spot where he'd just been standing. Some of the prisoners wailed.
Made of the same shifting murk as the other horrors infesting Tilverton, the spider was perhaps the size of a child, its fused bulbs of head and body hanging between arched, segmented legs. Hoping he could land a blow before it reoriented on him, Kevin hacked at its abdomen.
Quick as a cat, the shadow wheeled to face him. His blade slashed through one of its legs, but without encountering any resistance, and without severing the limb.
The spider scuttled toward him and he retreated, cutting and thrusting as he went. It was still like sweeping his sword through empty air. In the dimness, he could just make out a hint of the shadow's ring of bulging eyes, the jagged mandibles opening and closing around its maw.
He backed into one of looms, which banged, rattled, and shed choking, eye-stinging dust into the air. As he started to flounder around that obstacle, he collided with strands of the shadow webbing. The stuff was as sticky as he would have expected, and it had hold of his sword arm, not that his sword had done him any good.
He struggled to pull free. The glue began to give but not quickly enough. The spider scuttled forward to plunge its no-doubt poisonous fangs into his flesh.
Just as the shadow's mandibles were about to close on his knee, he heaved his legs up, evading the bite. The weakened adhesion couldn't support his weight, and he fell free of the webbing and onto the shadow.
He plunged right through the creature just as his sword had done. For an instant, as they were joined, his mind blazed with inhuman sensations. He slammed down on the floor beneath the spider's underbelly.
The shadow started to scuttle off him. Gripping his sword by the blade for use in such close quarters, he jammed the point into the crack between the spider's abdomen and cephalothorax.
For some reason, this time, the steel bit into solid matter, and the phantom jerked and thrashed. Kevin used his sword to roll the spider onto its back, then he kept pressure on the weapon until the ghastly thing stopped moving.
The squire needed to rest but knew he didn't have time. Panting and trembling, he cut the captives free.
Most of them, anyway. On closer investigation, he found that a couple were but dry, shriveled husks.
But the majority were alive. Some were even strong enough to help the weak ones along. Kevin reckoned that with luck, he could get them all out.
He nearly did.
Scouting ahead for shadows, he led the prisoners back the way he'd come. Once, as the procession passed beneath a tattered gonfalon, a toddler started to cry, and everyone froze in terror, certain the noise would bring shadows down on their heads. The child's mother quickly put her hand over his mouth, and no shadow came to investigate the sound. Later on, the fugitives came upon a bellpull, and a scrawny, gap-toothed fellow, who seemed a bit mad from his ordeal, stared at the velvet strap in fearful fascination, as if he didn't want to ring it but felt a compulsion to do so. The matron with the gray ringlets took him by the arm and led him on by.
At last Kevin spied the marble bust of a sharp-nosed, crafty-looking fellow siting on its pedestal. He'd noticed it coming in, and it meant that the exit into the Medusa's Garden was just ahead. He smiled, and a psychic shriek stabbed into his head.
Some of the prisoners cried out. Others clutched their heads and sobbed. Though equally pained by the silent caterwauling, Kevin yelled at them and shoved them. He had to keep them moving, had to get them out the door before their pursuers arrived.
He chivvied them down the long rectangular entrance hall and almost to the arched exit before instinct impelled him to look back. He couldn't see shapes, not yet, but the darkness boiled with movement. Shadows were pouring out of the doorways along the walls.
Kevin reckoned he needed to delay the phantoms for at least a few seconds. Otherwise, few if any of the captives would make it outside. He turned and tried to bellow a war cry, but it came out as more of a weary, frightened squeak. He strode toward the far end of the chamber, and a wave of shadow hurtled out of the gloom to meet him.
He drove his sword into a shadow's chest but never knew whether he'd slain it, for the next instant, the rest of them swept over him, and after that, he was no longer able to keep track of specific adversaries. There was only a pack, a many-limbed mass, striking and snatching at him from every side, as he lurched and whirled and slashed at it.
Once, for a split second, a narrow gap appeared in the mass, and Kevin glimpsed other devils loping toward the door. He wished he could intercept them as well, but knew there was no chance of it. Cold hands seized hold of his arms and shoulders, and the strength began to flow out of him.
Even as he struggled to pull free, other shadows clutched at him, and it was hopeless. He resolved not to scream, but did it anyway, sure the phantoms were sucking out the final traces of his life.