Lawrence Watt-Evans - In the Empire of Shadow

“Noisy, that’s what,” Singer retorted. “Why go out of our way to anger our host? Didn’t we come here peacefully, to ask it to send us home?”

Pel blinked in surprise-not that blinking made any difference, in the darkness.

They had, hadn’t they?

After what had happened to Bill Marks, after seeing Dibbs and the others hanging over the gate, after all the corpses and monsters, Pel had forgotten that it was possible to think of Shadow as anything but the enemy.

“What about Ted?” he asked quietly.

“Let him go,” Singer said. “There’s nothing we can do anyway, is there?”

“True,” Pel reluctantly admitted.

“So what do we do now?” Amy asked.

“We wait,” Raven repeated.

“Or maybe we ask Shadow politely for some light,” Singer suggested. “Or to send us home.”

“You think it can hear us?” Pel asked, peering around into the darkness.

Then, abruptly, before Singer could answer, light blazed; blinded, Pel threw an arm over his eyes. Even through his closed lids, the light that poured around the shielding arm was intensely bright.

Then, gradually, it dimmed, and after a moment Pel risked opening his eyes, arm still raised.

The floor was blue-gray flagstones, joined so well that the seams were almost invisible. His boots, Imperial military issue, were muddy and badly scuffed; the cuffs of his purple uniform pants were frayed and stained. The light was still bright, but bearable.

Cautiously, he raised his eyes and lowered his arm.

Something was glowing overhead-not the ceiling, which was now visible perhaps fifty feet up, but something several feet below the ceiling, something long and straight that ran from the wall above the gate down the length of the room-if it was a room. Pel looked around.

He and most of the others were standing near one end of a chamber that was perhaps fifty feet wide at floor level, but at least sixty by the time it reached the blue-painted ceiling, thanks to the setbacks on either side where the Shadow things stood. However, it was not at all clear whether it was a room or a corridor, because the length was easily a hundred yards, and the far end was not a wall, but a gigantic staircase leading upward.

The walls were pale gray stone, unadorned-granite, Pel guessed. The floor was blue-gray flagstone, unbroken by rugs, carpets, rushes, or any sort of inlay or decoration. The ceiling was hard to make out beyond the glowing rod, or beam, or whatever it was, but it appeared to be plaster, painted the color of the sky in a baroque fresco, that warm, rich blue that made such a fine background for cherubs and chiffon-draped nudes.

Pel couldn’t see any cavorting nymphs here, though-just blank blue. The whole place had a rather barren, unfinished look to it. The intense color of the ceiling didn’t seem to go very well with the natural gray of the walls.

The light source was an utter mystery; Pel had never seen anything remotely like it. It was as if there were an invisible tube full of glowing gas running the length of the chamber, then vanishing into that immense stairway.

Ted Deranian was more than halfway to the stairs, Pel saw; everyone else was clustered near the door.

Everyone else human, anyway-there were all those creatures on the ledges, too. Some looked almost normal-panthers and apes-while others were tentacular horrors, or just things that Pel couldn’t describe. They ranged from the size of a cat-assuming there weren’t others he couldn’t see that were even smaller-up to a gigantic creature near the gate that could only be called a dragon, so large that it appeared to have some difficulty squeezing onto the ledge.

All of them, even in the brilliant white light, were black. Some were flat grayish black, some were glossy black, but all were black, except for eyes, claws, and teeth. Even the dragon was shiny black, from its pointed snout to its snakelike tail, its taloned feet to its batlike wingtips, scales glistening darkly.

And as Pel watched, the dragon moved.

All of the Shadow creatures looked alive, all of them seemed to be breathing, their eyes open and alert, but the others were motionless-or at least staying where they were; a few twitched or shuddered, a few heads turned, claws shifted slightly.

The dragon, though, was stretching its foreclaws and wings, and black horny claws rasped loudly against stone.

Everyone turned at the sound; Pel saw that Raven was rubbing his eyes and waving his head, as if still blind from the flash, while Singer and Amy were blinking. The others seemed to be okay as they turned to look up at the dragon.

It stretched its neck out over the edge of its ledge and peered down at the humans below; Pel could look directly into its greenish-gold eyes, could see the odd frill, or tendrils, or whatever it was that dangled from the monster’s chin, and the hard ridges above the eyes.

Then it slithered down from the ledge.

Singer made a dash for the doorway, but the dragon was faster; the soldier stopped dead only a foot or so from its flank as it interposed itself between the humans and their only exit.

“Damn,” Singer said, as he backed away. It was the first word any of them had spoken since the flash.

“Now what?” Prossie asked.

The dragon hissed, but made no threatening moves; it simply sat there, between the humans and the door.

“I think,” Pel said slowly, “that this is just another version of those slug things-making sure we can’t turn back.”

“But Sawyer’s outside,” Singer objected.

“I suppose he was right,” Pel said. “Shadow didn’t care about him-but it wants the rest of us.”

“So what do we do?” Amy asked.

Pel shrugged. “We go on,” he said. “At least now we can see where we’re going.”

* * * *

Amy’s feet hurt-but then, they had hurt for days now. A year ago, she would have said she could never walk two hundred miles, not if she had all the time in the world and her life depended on it, and especially not when she felt so heavy and tired all the time, whether it was from the gravity here or because she was pregnant. She would have said she could never walk so far.

But now she had done it, and as a direct result, her feet ached. It seemed unfair that even after reaching this stupid fortress, she still had to walk farther. Why wasn’t Shadow right there at the front door, waiting for them?

It was probably trying to impress or intimidate them, making them walk down this ridiculous huge room lined with monsters; she didn’t see what other possible use such a place could have.

Amy had no intention of being impressed or intimidated, though; she thought the room was ugly, was nothing in comparison to, say, the main hall at Union Station in Washington, even if it was a lot longer. And they’d seen plenty of monsters already-the stovepipe things, and the giant bat, and the others they had fought at the spaceship, and the ones that had attacked them back at Stormcrack the first time they saw Faerie. She wasn’t particularly surprised by more of them.

At least this time they weren’t trying to kill her.

That dragon, though, was crowding them.

It didn’t actually push anyone, but as they moved forward, it moved along with them, its talons scratching on the stone floor like fingernails on a blackboard, and it wouldn’t retreat-if they tried to turn back it stopped and stood there watching them, lashing its tail like an angry cat’s, or like a snake squirming, blocking them. If someone tried to go around it it would lunge, and scamper, and cut off whoever it was that had tried to escape.

Singer and Raven had tried to split up and go around both ends, which was when the party had learned that the dragon’s tail was prehensile, capable of tripping a man and then picking him up, and also when they had discovered that the dragon’s full, extended length was at least fifty feet-it could stretch itself across the entire width of the hall.