The black things ate him feet-upward. They'd no mouths, only shadows and acid that turned his skin black as burned coal, darker than drow and into one of their own. Ate him inside out and the night fell for good. Shadows dancing around some broken stone under the ground forever like the Underdark the Sharran flapped her lips about. Soaked in the marrow of his bones like tar pitch charring his insides. He was too tired to give way to fear of it or even to groan it out.
Then sunlight shone in bright through the window and he opened his eyes as if ten stone giants had been using his head for a bowling game all night and sitting on it.
"Drow!" He sat up and drew his crossbow. The pair of idiots hadn't taken it from him, Mask's favours. "They did something that stayed. Heal it on me, curse you!"
"You won't know if I slay you or cure you," Viconia said. She looked stronger; black circle in her right hand, white hair damp and stringy on her shoulders. "Shar revealed all to me in my midnight prayer, for all I was weak enough to almost dare to forsake the ritual."
"Then she fell asleep in the bathwater barrel all night," Xzar offered helpfully, "and she's lying, dark Shar wasn't especially helpful." He rubbed his hands together, green sparks flying between them.
"Silence, heretic. The shadows drain; the difficult and exhausting restoration prayer overcomes it. For which the priest deserves high compensation," Viconia said.
"Lay it on me." Montaron levelled the bolt up. She'd need his muscle-backing; didn't need to give the ear to the gibberling crap spewing from her gums. She hesitated, giving a few more epithets, then started to call out the name of her goddess.
It was dark, same as the shadows themselves; but got rid of what they'd left under his skin, took away the cursed lingering weakness to make him fighting-fit again. No shadows moved without something to guide 'em; kill it and squeeze this town of every last copper for the favour. He stood up as the drow fell to her knees. She rubbed at her reddened eyes.
"It weakens the caster in exchange," Viconia said. "Males, go to the town matron or whatever it is called and present yourselves as willing mercenaries. They are shadows that belong not to Shar; she would they were restored." She sneezed, rubbed at her nose, and flung herself dramatically as a cheap actress down on her bed and drew covers and cloak thickly around her. "And fetch me something to eat while you're there; I need sustenance. Even this peasant town should supply one or two necessities. Mulled wine, a vintage no later than twelve-eighty if it must be human; warm almond milk; three cuts of roast surface-rothe from the thigh, rare; two bunches of grapes; white bread cooked with lightly fried egg—still white, mind; a baked, plucked young hen; creamed herring with oysters; boiled egg stuffed with cheese and new peas; baked hazelnuts wrapped in fresh cuts of good bacon; pickled onions with ginger in light pastry; plum rissoles; fresh fig pie; bean tart; two pears in wine and spices; a bowl of clear mushroom soup with strong seasoning; ...and a large turnip salad." She sneezed again.
"Still haven't got a priest cure for commoner's cold?" Montaron said.
"Do what I have said, rivvil!" She flung one of her boots out of the cavern of covers in reasonably good aim.
—
"Sunlight's still blazing. Time to haul your arse out of the covers while it lasts," Montaron said. The grim spectre of the bone-picked remains of two scrawny chickens and pickled cabbage rinds lay on the scratched pewter tray in front of her in bed; Viconia DeVir the noble drow held a drumstick in one hand and a lump of brown bread in the other, a mug of warm tea steaming beside her. She ripped off the white flesh of the ex-rooster between her teeth.
"You know not the xund of the casting, its cost," she said, and gulped down a mouthful of tea to wash the meat down.
"The-darkness-drains-life-and-lodges-in-bones-and-so-the-divine-caster-has-to-take-the-weakness-on-themselves," Xzar recited. "Normal necromantic spells use what's there, but the divine casters just can't think of a better way to cure draining! Nor can their sources." He held a history book under his arm and a scroll he'd made Montaron filch from the local Cowlie, who'd given instructions like they were Amnish slaves.
"Revolting blasphemer. El maglust lu' jivvilmin: you deserve to die alone in pain caused by the Lady of Night." Tea-stained crumbs flew around the drow's face. Xzar was the type to stand on the top of a mountain in a lightning storm with a metal staff in hand explaining to Talos Stormlord why he shouldn't exist. "What did the matron—the male matron, I suppose, primitive rivvil—say to you?" Viconia said.
"Mayor hired us," Montaron said. "Rumours are that it's some crazy old lady called the Umar Witch—"
Xzar produced another book from his robes. "Umar Witch Project, by Hythir Donnhew. Dear Diary, I just want to apologise to Joshan's mother, and Mykeal's mother, and my mother. I am so sorry! Because it was my fault. I was the one who brought them after the Umar Witch. I was the one that said, 'keep going north'. I was the one who said that we were not lost. It was my project. I am so scared! I don't know what's out there but there was cackling out there in the woods..."
Viconia stared. "And how did this female come to scribe all this at extremity?"
"That's what the rabbits want you to believe," Xzar said. Montaron ignored him, because he'd had much the same thought about a bard wasting time scribbling if they were supposed to be so near death. Come to think of it, the pair of bards with the Bhaalspawn were both that annoying, joining the brat to squabble over the flat-chested Silvershield sap without a thimbleful of common sense in her brain.
"Cowlie says there's an escaped murderer's cabin up in the woods and perhaps he killed the local ranger," Montaron said. "But he's no hand-waver. I say we find him first so he don't decide we've shady motives coming up from Athkatla."
"Shar forbid," Viconia pronounced piously and much becrumbedly.
"Get moving, drow."
—
She groused in daylight; they tramped north-east through blasted bloody forest that the normal sort of pointy-ear would have relished, but fortunately for them they didn't have any such hindrances in their way. Then the rotten-meat stench of dead men reached them on the air, and they found some of the shadow's kills.
'Twas only orcs and the like, not the human or two that'd been taken missing from Imnesvale. Montaron kicked the body of an eight-foot ogre, then rifled the pouches for gold. A pair of silver pieces and a piece of bone wrapped in some field-grasses. There were claw-marks in the body that glinted dark, and they'd not bled much. He couldn't see rhyme nor rhythm to the pattern of bodies strewn about the clearing; a kobold and a goblin and pair of thick-bodied orcs and the ogre. Trails beyond them as if one or two more'd been dragged off. He spotted one piece of battle-insignia: a Sythillian device. They'd made a camp from wood with bones of roast squirrel on the fire, and a rough latrine that had the drow grimace. As if she didn't have bodily needs, same as all who walked the earth; and she still sniffled and whined of her exhaustion.
"Claws," the necromancer said, bent closely over an orc. "Shaped like..." He sketched in the dirt; the ninnyhammer did that plenty of times with no meaning, but Montaron troubled to look. A set of four claws, medium-close together. It reminded him...of scratches he'd come by on the Sword Coast below old Ulcaster. Worgs and vampire-wolves with red eyes and iced-over breath.
"Wolf," Montaron said. There'd been some tale of the Bhaalspawn and werewolves over the Beard, but that had been afterward. He looked again at the old bones. "Large ones." Bigger they were, more blood and guts as they fell. Shadow-wolves. It didn't make him feel any better about freak witcheries. "We could drag a head or two back to the village and make out we nobly earned our pay." The marks were mostly on the orc-kin's bodies; chop off the heads and none in the pissant village'd be bright enough to know the corpses were old. Like he'd have known it himself if not for the mad mage's babbling on.
"No, Monty. Can't get away so easily as that! It's interesting," Xzar said. "Necromantic research ho! Walk faster, Miss DeVir."
The ranger cabin lay peacefully in the centre of a clearing with honeysuckle vines wound in a golden sweet-smelling mass around it, cheery bluebirds perched on ash trees twined together, and wild lavender growing purple and green by its wooden walls. Montaron hated the sight of it. The old blood spatters on the path, though, improved the setting considerably. There were snakelike lines in the dirt track vanishing into the long grass as if something had been dragged out of there. Something roughly human-sized.
Trail vanished some way in the grass; they went inside the place to spot the marks of a battle. A shattered iron longsword lay broken on the dirt floor. A longbow had been soaked from above by a leak in the roof, tangled and useless. Shelves and crockery were ruined as if the drow'd thrown one of her tantrums and scratches stained the wall, more blood spilled there.
"One month or so past," the necromancer said, fiddling with the stains. "The blood's human. The shadow-wolves don't leave much behind."
"They took her alive," Viconia said, posed with an outthrust part-bare thigh against the wall, her hood rolled down. "They left the eroln dead; they dragged the female through the woods. She could have lost this much blood and still lived, at least for some small time." Her tongue crept lightly along her lips. "What do you think they did with her, necromancer?"
"Living flesh can be fed on for a very long time, if proper care is taken," Xzar said. "Take ghouls, for instance; there's nothing a ghoul loves more than the taste of soft, sweet mortal flesh. A lot of them tend to have gastronomical preferences for elves or gnomes for delicacies. The cheeks and haunches especially, I believe... But ghouls continue to exist even if they're starved; it's only a craving. Other creatures, however, will turn inert without sustenance from vital energies. The vampiric form of parasite cannot exist sans a source of life to bite from...or to rip the throat into tiny little pieces so you can't even use the trachea for a scarf.
"The sad thing is that most undead simply don't have impulse control. And then there's wraiths, who can want all sorts of things—souls or fear or blood or milk teeth or the second layer of flayed skin. Insubstantial and also able to survive without it; but aren't the living only around to be tormented for fun, or spell components, or boredom or instinct?"
The drow laughed triumphantly. "True enough, surfacer."
"There be no purpose to this," Montaron said. He'd gone to all the trouble of prying open the metal strongbox the ranger kept below her bed only to find a few coppers and a scribed letter from her mother. "Listen, drow; and hear it again, mad mage. Corthala's the name of the escaped killer from Athkatla."
"Cowled Wizards I don't like," Xzar contributed. "Who sets limits on magery? It doesn't matter if the quest for the great unknown has to be off other people's spleens. Why set limits on research? I'd like to slice through the marrow of their bones and stick it in a blender with weevil spit—"
"And a pair of half-elf adventurers who haven't trotted back in a fiveday," Montaron said. "Specifically, a druid bitch wearing the pants and a bootlicking stutterer trailing on her leash."
"Harpers," Xzar hissed.
"Travelled with Benrulon some time. Kindly and gently cooperated with us on our noble quest to free Nashkel mines," Montaron said.
The drow nodded. "I heard of them. I could be quite comfortable with vengeance against those of that order." She smiled wide as a lanternfish's ragged jaws, the sort dangling sickly green light in black water to fetch prey into the sharp teeth.
"Part two of this comes when Corthala's either killed 'em hisself—or they've started to feel terribly sorry for the poor soul fleeing the Cowlies. Wouldn't trust their Amnish word for a copper even with the metal between your own teeth. Worst coming's that we get to fight all three. So bend your pointy ears, drow, and bend 'em good..."
—
The Harper Jaheira was a healer, and her husband Khalid a stuttering coward waving a longsword about. Stop the healer, and let her pansy man wilt for the loss of his leash. It hadn't worked as planned, but they were feeding the daisies they liked so much now.
Xzar held Corthala's corpse up by the hair; sliced through the throat; and walked inside the cabin to stick the bleeding head like a paperweight on the parchment-strewn table.
Cursed Harpers won't trouble us again. Montaron brushed at the bruise on his sword arm that'd been a bone-deep cut a minute or two before. No sense in tidying the bodies outside: murderer Corthala killed them all, and that's the story he'd tell to the Bhaalspawn brat if he ever crossed paths with them a second time.
"Shar, feed their souls to your greater glory," Viconia pronounced. "I thank you for your grace in providing me with a company who are not as witless as they seem." Her red glance caught Montaron's eyes. "You exploited their weaknesses, lotha sakphul. The drow would praise this."
They'd gotten in with chitchat of Benrulon, the half-hin book-raised brat supposed to be in Athkatla these days. Then the damn Harpers grew suspicious; the drow got shadows around him and her both so's he could get one good stab in from behind. In the half-elf bitch's leathers under her ribs. He'd made it the perfect shot to her kidneys and left her bleeding on the grass.
Then the man'd gone wild into it while his woman lay chanting to herself, and there he'd note to himself that his boasts to the drow'd gone wrong. The stuttering pansy'd gone furious and coming on fast, slicing like a crazy barbarian berserker so he couldn't duck under the blade for a good stab to the kneecaps. But Xzar had conjured up enough goblins for a distraction, and gotten brief enough a moment of sanity to make one of 'em slit the Harper bitch's throat. Montaron would've liked the kill himself, but he weren't dim enough to object. J-j-j-jaheira! were her hubby's last stutter, so short of bardsong-heroic it almost made him laugh. Then the mad mage messed with fireballs and wraithspells with the drow holding Corthala in place—and then they'd all gone dead. He'd spat into the Harper's staring green eyes and wished it'd taken longer for the snotty tart to die.
Valygar Corthala's head held down a map the mad wizard studied, staining it with blood from its neck.
"Umar Hills. Werewolf cave. Dwarven camp remains. Haven't finished exploring the north part." Xzar picked up the head again, holding the paperweight close to his face. "Foul magic, you think, Lord Corthala? Foul magic? Come back and have a nice long chat about it!"
Dark clouds of smoke fizzled into the cabin. Montaron kept his hands on his blade in case of the wrong thing summoned up. And then the head's eyes opened, blank like eggs rolling around in the skull.
"Valygar Corthala, slayer of necromancers!" Xzar said. "Where are the shadows in the Umar Hills? Tell the last thing you saw on your death!"
Beyond the bare windows of Corthala's cottage, below the thick branches of trees that blocked sunllight, a black line too tall for a bird rushed past.
—