—and without warning, Riven leaped from the chair, grabbed him by the shoulders and screamed into his face, "Wake up!"
Cale snapped open his eyes, heart racing. Beside him, the campfire had burned down to embers. He lay still and stared up at the cloudy night sky. What had the dream meant?
He heard a sound, like wet fabric being slowly torn, like curtains shredding in the wind. His skin went gooseflesh. He propped himself up on an elbow and looked across the campsite to Jak....
A horror stood over the halfling, flaying him alive.
"Jak!" Cale leaped to his feet, blade bear, holy symbol somehow already in his hand.
The creature uttered a surprised hiss and dropped into a hunched crouch as it whirled to face him.
To Cale's right, Riven awakened with a gasp, his hand going immediately to his unsheathed sabers, which lay beside him. He took in the scene in a breath.
"Dark!" he cursed, and scrambled to his feet.
Even hunched the creature stood taller than Cale, with warty green skin as creased and rough as old leather. Beside it Jak—held immobile by some spell, Cale assumed—looked as small as an infant. Arms as thick as Cale's legs ended in long, black nails; legs as wide as a man's waist ended in splayed, clawed feet. Veins, muscles and sinew pulsed and flexed with each movement of its powerful frame. A flat head, dominated by a wide mouth and row upon row of teeth, sat on a short, thick neck. Its face struck Cale as vaguely amphibian. Somehow, it reminded him of a toad. Its eyes were merciless gray slits—the easterner's eyes.
This was the easterner's true form, Cale intuitively knew. And he also knew, as he had known when he had faced the shadow demon Yrsillar, that this creature was not of Toril.
Jak's blood, black in the firelight, glistened on its clawed fingers.
"Everything feels pain," the creature croaked, and winked at Riven.
It stuck its blood-soaked fingers in its huge mouth and slobbered them clean.
Cale roared and charged. Riven bounded over the campfire to join Cale's attack. As he did, the assassin shouted a word that recalled to Cale the syllables the assassin sometimes spoke in his sleep: "Vredlaul!"
The utterance of the word staggered the powerful creature. It stumbled backward a step as though it had been punched in the chest. Cale closed, raised his blade high—
—and the easterner croaked a word of power and darkness fell. Utter pitch. Cale could see nothing. He swung his blade anyway but struck nothing. He froze, dropped into a crouch, and listened.
"Here," he hissed, so he and Riven could get an idea of where each stood.
"Here," answered Riven, from his left.
Cale advanced a step, blade held ready for a quick stab in any direction, ears peeled. He had an idea of where Jak was and stayed in that vicinity.
"Here," he said again.
"Here," answered Riven, a few steps ahead of Cale but still to his right.
Cale heard nothing. Where was the blasted thing?
As abruptly as it fell, the darkness suddenly lifted. Cale and Riven stood a few paces apart. The creature was gone.
Cale kept his gaze from Jak, at least for the moment. He could not allow himself to be distracted.
He signaled Riven in handcant, Invisible. Move on my signal.
Riven nodded understanding.
Cale waited only a heartbeat before giving the signal.
Both men exploded into action around the campsite. Leaping, lunging, blades cutting the air. Neither struck anything.
"Gone," Riven said afterward, sweating and breathing heavily.
"Stay alert," Cale said, and he went to Jak.
The spell still held the halfling immobile. The easterner had broken all of his fingers. They twisted and jutted at angles that made Cale's stomach turn. Too, the creature had bared Jak's chest and flayed the skin and muscle above his heart. Cale could see the white of bone peeking through that shredded mass of red. The easterner had done to Jak what Riven had threatened to do to the easterner.
Cale held his breath as he held his ear to the halfling's mouth. There! Breath. Jak still lived, despite the torture he had endured. Cale could hardly imagine the pain Jak had felt, was still feeling. Tears threatened but he held them back.
"I'm sorry, little man. I'm sorry."
They should have killed the easterner! They should have cut him up and burned him to ash, just as Riven had said. Cale would never make that mistake again. Not with any of them. Two and two were four, bastards.
He had prayed for spells from Mask earlier in the night—at midnight, during his watch—and had requested spells of healing. Mask had granted his request, and had also granted Cale knowledge of another prayer that Cale had never before cast. Fortunately, that spell was not necessary.
Eyes blurry with tears, Cale recited prayers of healing, pouring into them all of his concern for Jak. One spell. Another. Another.
The wounds in Jak's flesh slowly closed, shrank to only white scars. Bone reknit. His breathing grew more regular. His body was healed. His soul... ?
"Hang on," Cale said.
He clutched his holy symbol, and whispered a spell that would free Jak from his paralysis.
The moment the spell took effect, Jak gasped and fell forward. Cale caught him and pulled him close. He could feel the halfling shaking, crying. Cale said nothing, only held his friend and waited for him to gather himself.
Jak could say nothing, only cried and quietly vented into Cale's cloak the pain and rage that his immobility had prevented him from expressing previously.
"I'm sorry, Jak," Cale said finally.
"What in the gods' names are you sorry about?" Riven said, his tone as cold as Deepwinter. "If Fleet wasn't so averse to doing what needs done, this never would have happened."
Cale shot the assassin a look so heated that even Riven wilted. Had he been within arm's reach, Cale would have killed him.
"You keep your godsdamned hole shut or I'll put my blade through it and out the back of your head. Then I'll cut you to pieces and burn you to ash. You understand? Do you understand?"
Riven took a step back.
Jak shook his head and leaned back. He pulled away from Cale, wiped away his tears, and examined his fingers. He didn't make eye contact with either Cale or Riven.
"No, Cale," Jak said. "He's right."
Cale started to protest but Jak cut him off. "No!" Jak looked Cale in the eyes and Cale saw something in his friend's gaze that he had never before seen there: hate. "He's right. I put down the pin. I'm not a Harper anymore. It's time I got my hands dirty."
Cale could think of nothing to say. He didn't know whether to take Jak's change of heart as a good or a bad thing. He remembered that Sephris had called Jak a "seventeen." He feared that the equation had just changed.
CHAPTER 12
THE GHOSTS OF THE PAST
Dawn did not lift the weight from Cale's soul. The thick clouds kept the landscape cast in a dull gray, which mirrored his mood. The three comrades said little as they walked the road back to Selgaunt. To Cale, Jak seemed conspicuously grim. The halfling had covered his bloodstained tunic with his travelling cloak, but that only hid the damage. Seemingly of their own accord, Jak's hands from time to time went to his chest, to the scars. He often flexed the fingers that the easterner had methodically broken, blinking at the memory of the pain.
Seeing that, and recalling Jak's hard words from the previous night, Cale despaired for his friend. He knew that certain actions, once taken, irrevocably polluted a man's soul. Cale had taken such actions long before, as had Riven. Jak never had, but Cale feared that he soon would. He blamed himself. His own words to Jak haunted him—Sometimes good people have to do hard things. He had known even when he'd mouthed the words that they had been a rationalization, a seductive invitation to walk a gray path. The first step down that path was always the hardest. But Cale knew too well that after that first step it became harder and harder to take another path. Jak seemed to have made up his mind to walk it.