Tyllin stood aside, regarded Cale with slitted eyes, gave a snarl, and waved him forward. Presented with no other option, he stalked cautiously past Tyllin and made his way down the hall. Cale realized how futile his resistance to an attack would be at this point.
Eyeing him hungrily, each pair of ghouls growled softly as he walked between them. Some pawed the air and snarled, unable to conceal their insatiable desire for his flesh. He kept his long sword ready and watched them all like a hawk, but none of them made an aggressive move.
As he passed each pair, they fell in behind him and herded him toward the shrine. Only a third of the way down the hall, he already had a small crowd of ghouls behind and still more before him. He could feel their hungry eyes boring into his back. Surprisingly, he felt unafraid. He felt the liberation of a condemned man being led to the gallows. He knew now that he would not get out of here alive, and the realization freed him from fear. Neither of us is coming out of that shrine, old man, he vowed.
Though many of the ghouls still wore clothing or had tattoos that Gale recognized as belonging to a one-time comrade, their feral yellow eyes no longer contained anything recognizably human. Magic and religious fanaticism had mutatA yellow-eyed shadow flitted in the corner of his vision. He whirled on it, blade high. Nothing was there.
Nothing but the gaming parlor where guildsmen once had bet their take from jobs on the chance deal of cards and the random fall of knucklebones. Human vices that Cale could understand.
Still scanning the darkness of the parlor for the shadow demon, his eyes fell to the floor and he gave a start. He stopped walking and looked more closely to be sure his vision had not deceived him. The crowd of ghouls behind herded closer. The floor just inside the doorway of the parlor appeared to be slowly boiling, like simmering soup. He felt title hairs on his arms rise and bend toward the weird floor, as though pulled. Had the shadow demon vanished into that? Before he could consider further, a chorus of impatient growls sounded from the ghouls.
"Maaassk," they mouthed as one, and the press of their vile, stinking bodies forced him forward.
Mask indeed, he thought as he walked. This is where your fanaticism has brought you, old man. He kept his eyes away from the half-eaten corpses
More doorways yawned to either side as he walked the rest of the long hall. The rooms beyond the doorways had once been familiar to him-here a meeting room, there a dining hall, there a training room-but like the gaming parlor, all of them now stood warped in some way. The familiar furnishings he had known lay toppled, broken, befouled, or missing altogether. Horrors had replaced them. A wall in the dining hall dripped what looked to be blood. Drops of crimson seeped through the plaster near the ceiling and ran down the wall in rivulets. Two ghouls crouched at the base, purring, and licked up the blood like children eating sweetened ice. The steady rasp of their tongues had worn grooves in the wall. Cale forced down the vomit that tried to climb up his throat. He sidestepped a patch of floor before him that oozed a thick, black liquid and walked on.
"Mask," the ghouls behind him murmured.
Instead of the familiar oak table and chairs standing in the center of the main meeting room, a sickly gray colored whirlpool now churned, as though the floor had become a thick liquid. Again, he felt a strange pull from the maelstrom. Streaks of ochre and viridian swirled a slow path into gray oblivion. Cale found the motion hypnotic. With an effort of will, he forced himself to look away before the urge to leap in overpowered him. As he turned away, he thought he glimpsed a pair of baleful yellow eyes peering at him from within the whirlpool.
He drew nearer to the shrine. The crowd of ghouls behind him grew as each pair fell in line.
He passed what had once been the training room for pickpocketing and climbing and saw that portions of the wall and floor seemed absent. Not hewn out or dug up, but absent, as though reality had been slashed open hen Rath. Again he thought he saw a pair of yellow eyes staring at him from the emptiness in the wall, but when he blinked, the eyes disappeared. Disconcerted, he turned away and focused his gaze forward on the open double doors of the shrine.
This is utter madness, he thought, and struggled to keep a tight grip on his sanity, The wrongness of the guildhouse made him dizzy and nauseated. A man could lose himself quickly. The living do not belong here, he thought. He now knew for certain that the Righteous Man had gone mad-summoning demons, turning guildsmen into ghouls, transforming the guildhouse into a seething den of vileness. There could be no other explanation. He no longer cared for the why of the Righteous Man's behavior-how could he hope to understand the reasons of the man who had done this-he only cared about stopping him.
That resolution brought him an odd, detached calm. He reached for his throat and felt the reassuring cool' ness of the necklace of missiles, rolled the last explosive globe between his fingers. He would kill the Righteous Man with his steel, then start a blaze with his globe that would incinerate the entire guildhouse and everything in it.
Resolved, he picked up his pace and strode unafraid for the shrine. The crowd of ghouls behind him loped to keep up.
He walked through the ornate doorway, turned to glare at the ghouls, then slammed the doors shut in their faces. He held the doors fast for a moment, expecting the ghouls to push them open and pile in behind him, but they made no effort to follow. They waited just outside. Gale could hear their low growling through the doors. They were only the escort, it seemed. He turned to survey the shrine.
"Erevis Gale come at last," said the Righteous Man, the contempt evident in his voice. The guildmaster stood near the front of the large shrine room, atop a raised dais, behind the block of basalt that served as an altar. Black candles burned in tall bronze candelabra but shed only dim light. Shadows filled every corner. Gale quickly glanced through them for the yellow eyes of the shadow demon but saw nothing.
Wooden pews lined the room from the back wall up to the altar. Ghouls filled those in the rear. Rocking gently and growling low, they held their hands clasped as though in prayer, a macabre mockery of piety. They watched him sidelong out of slitted eyes. They licked their fangs hungrily but kept their seats.
Already holding his long sword at the ready, he filled his other hand with a dagger. At that, the ghouls began to growl and rock faster but still remained seated. He walked straight down the center aisle, through and past the ghouls, halfway to the altar. He kept his eyes locked on the masked face of the Righteous Man.
That's right, I've-come," he said. "What in the name of the gods have you done here?"
The Righteous Man stepped out from behind the altar and spoke in a soft, menacing tone "You've come to do Mask's bidding, perhaps?"
"Maaasssk," the ghouls in the pews echoed. "Masssk." They rocked and rocked.
The guildmaster's voice sounded different, Gale noted, but he attributed it to the guildmaster's obvious insanity. Only then did the Righteous Man's question strike him-Mask's bidding? What does that mean?
He shook his head and forced himself to stay focused.