"Then perhaps they can blast a way through."
"Perhaps, but I imagine that would ruin any hope of taking Szass Tam by surprise."
"by surprise."
"by surprise."
Startled, Bareris turned to Mirror and saw that the ghost, who currently resembled a smeared reflection of himself, looked just as surprised. He knew he hadn't truly repeated himself nor spoken loud enough to raise echoes in the sizable cavern he and the phantom were traversing. Yet he had an eerie sense that something-or everything-had repeated, as if the world itself were stuttering.
He and Mirror had hiked a long way without encountering any of the long-buried perils for which these depths were infamous, but he suspected their luck had just run out. He drew his sword, and the ghost's shadow-blade oozed outward from his fist. Pivoting, they looked for a threat. It might be difficult to spot. Too many fallen boulders littered the cave floor. Too many alcoves and tunnel mouths opened on blackness.
"Do anything? You see," said Mirror, his voice rising at the end of the second word. "Bareris, I swear, I said that properly. Or at least, I didn't feel that I was jumbling the words."
"I believe you," Bareris said.
"What's happening to us?"
"us."
"I don't know, but maybe…"
"maybe"
"maybe"
"… we should keep moving."
"Way? Which."
Good question. More than one passage appeared to run northeast, and the magic pointing in the direction of the arch couldn't differentiate between them. Bareris chose at random.
"Let's try this one."
He took a stride, and the darkness deepened.
Only a supernatural manifestation could account for such a thing, because here in the heart of the mountain, the dark had already been absolute. The undead enjoyed a measure of vision even so, but now Bareris couldn't see as far as before, and even nearby objects looked hazy, as though he were viewing them through fog.
He sang the opening notes of a charm to conjure light. Perhaps it would reveal the location of the creature or creatures he suspected were hiding in the murk.
Something snatched him off his feet and hurled him ten paces backward into the cavern wall.
The shock of impact was enough to stun even him. He sensed rather than saw something looming over him, poised to attack again. He raised his sword, hoping the thing would impale itself when it struck. Though he doubted that would be enough to keep the blow from smashing home.
Light flared in the darkness. It stung Bareris, and he realized it was more than just a flash. It was the power of Mirror's god, invoked to smite an undead foe.
The radiance gave Bareris his first look at the thing. It was huge, a formless cloud of darkness with several ragged arms writhing and coiling from the central mass. Without turning-lacking a head, eyes, or an internal structure of bones and joints, it didn't need to-it shifted its tentacles away from Bareris to threaten the ghost on the other side of it. One arm struck at Mirror, and he caught the blow on his shield. But it still knocked him back, a sign that both he and the creature existed in the same non-corporeal state.
Mirror cut at the arm as it started to retract. "It's a vasuthant!" he shouted.
Unlike Mirror, evidently, Bareris had never encountered a vasuthant, but the undead horrors figured in a couple of the ancient tales he'd collected over the years. They were sentient wounds in the fabric of time itself, a condition that allowed them to play tricks with the march of the moments to destroy their prey.
If this entity truly was a vasuthant, even Mirror couldn't contend with it unaided. Bareris floundered to his feet, drew a deep breath, and shouted. The thunderous bellow shook the cave, brought stones showering from the ceiling, and blasted a bit of the vasuthant's blackness loose from the central body. The wisps instantly withered away to nothing.
The vasuthant turned its attention back to him, as the new tentacles squirming from its cloudy body attested. Gripping his sword with both hands, Bareris poised himself to dodge and cut.
With luck, his enchanted blade would hurt the creature, insubstantial though it was.
The vasuthant snatched for him. He sidestepped, swung at its arm, and slashed completely through it. He felt just a hint of resistance, as though the blade were severing gossamer threads. The end of the creature's limb boiled into nonexistence.
Time skipped backward.
The vasuthant snatched for him. He sidestepped, but it adjusted its aim, and the tentacle coiled around him anyway. It yanked tight as a noose encircling the neck of a man dropped through the trapdoor of a gallows, somehow exerting crushing pressure even though it had no solidity.
The vasuthant jerked Bareris into the center of its shifting darkness. Pain burned through him. The creature was trying to poison him with the energy of undeath. Since he was undead too, the effect wasn't as devastating as it would have been to a living man, but it might well prove lethal over time.
It was difficult even to see the arm gripping him now that the vasuthant had merged it with the central cloud. Bareris cut at the place where he judged it ought to be, but even if he was right this time, the stroke had no apparent effect. Another burst of agony jolted him, and the relentless constriction around his waist threatened to pinch him in two.
Just barely visible through the murk, Mirror called to his god and slashed his sword through a portion of the vasuthant's body. Its shadowy core seethed, and the ring of pressure around Bareris's torso loosened.
Bareris bellowed a war cry and swung his sword. The tentacle frayed from existence, dropping him to the cavern floor. Still inside the animate darkness, he cut at it repeatedly until it flowed away and uncovered him.
Without taking his eyes off the thing, Bareris asked, "Are we winning?"
"I don't…"
"don't"
"… know," Mirror replied. "I only ever fought one vasuthant, and this one's bigger and more powerful."
So they really had precious little idea what they were facing. But Bareris surmised he needed some mystical defense in place to counter the creature's manifest ability to revisit a moment that hadn't worked out as it would have preferred. He sang, and eight more Barerises sprang into existence around him, each with a stance and facial expression identical to his own.
Just in time too, for an instant later the vasuthant surged forward like a towering black wave.
A tentacle flailed, and one of the illusory doubles burst like a soap bubble at its touch. Bareris stepped in and cut the vasuthant.
A tentacle flailed, and a different illusory double burst like a soap bubble at its touch. Bareris stepped in and cut the vasuthant.
He grinned a wolfish grin. Perhaps he'd hit on a winning tactic.
Then one of his duplicates vanished without the vasuthant snagging it with one of its limbs or making any other form of visible attack. It was a pointed reminder that the entity still possessed capabilities he didn't understand.
Still, he liked his and Mirror's chances better than he had before, partly because when the vasuthant obliterated all his illusory doubles, he could always sing up another batch.
He and his companion battled on, often with sword strokes, sometimes with their mystical abilities. Bareris chanted to leech the strength out of the vasuthant much as it had tried to do to him. Mirror hammered it with flares of celestial power. Meanwhile, time lurched and stuttered.
The latter effect was disorienting and obliged them to defend themselves from many of the vasuthant's most cunning attacks not once but twice. Still, they kept the living darkness from doing grievous harm to them, while their attacks withered bits of it.