James Clemens - Shadowfall

She cried out but held her place, hands pressed.

Tylar watched the blade unsheathe between her palms, ablaze with the same silver light. It blinded the eye. He drew it to its full length from her hands. It stretched the length of his arm, solid moonlight, in contrast with the hilt’s sunlight.

Tylar gaped at the sword. He suddenly recognized what he held. He had seen the weapon before. On the streets of Punt. Wielded by the black naether beast, the assassin of Meeryn. The same blade had plunged through Meeryn’s breast and heart.

“It killed her,” he gasped. He felt the certainty stir deep inside him, smoky and black. Meeryn’s naethryn knew the weapon. Tylar faced the others. “Here is the blade that slew Meeryn.”

At his feet, Dart again cried out. She rolled away. Her hands smoked as if seared… but her flesh appeared untouched.

Then something ranker welled through the air, coming up from below. It reeked of black bile and the rot of poisoned flesh.

Kathryn grabbed Tylar’s shoulder. “Get back.”

Tylar stumbled away with her. The others retreated in all directions.

Up from the wound in the soil, where the blade had been planted, a black snake of smoky darkness coiled upward.

“Gloom,” Tylar said, recognizing the steaming stack.

The naether bled into this world, substanceless but deadly. The stench worsened. Distantly, heard in the bones rather than the ear, a sound issued forth, not of this world. It keened with a piercing cry that threatened to shatter teeth.

Ears were covered. Feet fled.

But the font of darkness slowly dissipated. The land closed over the rent. The wound, free of the sword, healed.

Still no one spoke.

Tylar held the Godsword, feeling its oily embrace of his palm and fingers. He wanted to toss the sword and run… and keep running. Instead, he squeezed his fingers tighter. He was the sword.

“What was that?” Rogger finally asked, the first to find his tongue.

“The naether,” Gerrod mumbled. “The sword pierced clean through from our world to the other.”

Tylar pictured the blade doing the same to Meeryn. Had she been pierced, not just through the heart, but all the way down to the naether? If so, perhaps it was a stream of Gloom, rather than the sword, that burned away her heart.

Reaching up, Tylar placed a hand to his own chest. Had Meeryn used the last of her dying Grace to reach into that same naether and drag forth her naethryn undergod and bind it to Tylar? Was it all she could do? Some way to continue her own battle in this war? Had she marked Tylar as her avatar and set him loose with a piece of herself?

He gripped the sword. If so… so be it. He had seen what killed Meeryn. And at the point of an ordinary sword, he had witnessed the corruption that turned ordinary men and women into ilk-beasts, the humanity burned from them. He lifted the blade. He knew which side of the war he wished to lend his sword, this sword… and himself.

The Gloom faded away, swallowed by the greater shadows of the myrrwood. The pillars stood as before, only their encrusted brown vines had turned to ash, the yellow lichen blackened. A stench still clung to the glade.

The woods seemed somehow darker. A grumbling, felt in the soles of the feet, threatened, and the bower overhead shivered. More rain drizzled through the disturbed canopy.

“The myrrwood felt the passage of the Gloom,” Gerrod said. “Certainly Chrism will have, too. It is no longer safe here. He will know about the sword.”

Tylar nodded in the direction of the castillion. “Then let us return what is his.”

“How do you propose to get to him?” Kathryn asked.

“The subterranean route,” Yaellin said. “The entrance is over here.”

They all followed the knight out the dark glade and through a short section of forest. A stone door appeared in the side of a small hummock. Its surface bore an etching of tangled wyldroses. Littick symbols glowed through the thorns and petals.

“ ‘Blood and bone,’ ” Gerrod read. “ Krys and ymm.”

“Warded with Chrism’s own name,” Kathryn said.

“And blood,” Yaellin said. He reached into a pocket of his cloak and removed a small crystal repostilary. “But the god’s own black bile will nullify the blessing.”

The knight removed the stopper. It had a small glass wand attached to its underside, like a woman’s sweetwater bottle, used to dab scent to throat and wrist. Only this was not so pleasant. Tylar whiffed the stench of black bile. It seemed even a god’s shite did not smell like roses.

Yaellin painted the bile along the lines of Littick lettering. The glow died under each stroke, smearing away the warding. Once done, a crack of stone sounded. Yaellin reached to draw the door open.

It slammed wide on its own.

A black snarl of roots burst forth, like the tentacles of a miiodon-and just as deadly. Yaellin was snatched and torn from his place, dragged into the tunnel’s entrance. Roots choked and tore. Blood spurted. His form disappeared without a sound. Even his scream was strangled away.

Other roots grabbed and tangled into the gathered party.

Dart fell to her backside, her ankle wrapped in vine. Tylar lunged at her, but she grabbed her dagger from its sheath and stabbed it into the root. The squirming vine blackened, cracking with flame. She tumbled away as the root fell to ash, releasing her.

Others fared worse. Dart’s friend Laurelle had been in Yaellin’s shadow. With the knight ripped from her side, she was seized at waist and leg.

Tylar twisted at the hip and swung his sword in a broad stroke. The shining blade cleaved through a mass of roots near the entrance. It passed as if through air. The severed roots writhed, spewing black blood. Laurelle fell free, as did Eylan, who had lunged to the girl’s aid and become entangled herself.

At the tunnel entrance, the stumped ends of the root, sliced by Rivenscryr, burst into flame, as if the blood inside were oil and the sword a tinder match. Coiling roots exploded from the inside, casting forth gouts of fiery debris. The flames raced deeper down the tunnel. More blasts echoed.

The party tumbled away.

“Yaellin…” Dart moaned.

He was gone.

Smoke and flames billowed out. The ground shook as the fires spread down the subterranean tunnel. A few roots writhed and twisted, but these also blew apart as the blood inside them torched.

“Away!” Tylar called with a pained expression.

He led them off through the myrrwood. He knew no path, but simply fled in the direction of the castillion.

A brilliant explosion lit the night behind them. Tylar turned in time to see one of the massive trunks of the myrrwood burst into flame, becoming a giant torch. Another, deeper in the forest, shattered with flames.

“The myrrwood is all one tree,” Gerrod said. “You’ve set its roots on fire. And it continues to spread, flaming through the channels of blood. From one tree to another.”

Tylar gaped.

“You lit the wick,” Rogger said. “Now all we can do is run!”

More trees exploded into living torches, all around them, behind and in front. The ground shook underfoot.

They fled as the forest continued its immolation. Trunks shattered, debris rained down. Smoke rolled and choked.

They had no choice but to keep fleeing-toward the castillion.

But they had no delusions for what awaited them.

“If Chrism didn’t know you were coming,” Rogger coughed out, “he does now. All of Chrismferry will be looking this way.”

Laurelle spoke, her face smeared with soot, tear tracks traced through the ash. “You… your sword.” She pointed.

Tylar raised the weapon, still gripping the warm hilt. Only that was all he held. In the mad flight, he hadn’t noticed.