Paul Kemp - Shadow witness

Cale gave a hard smile. "It is," he softly agreed. "Looks better dead, though."

Jak giggled at that, but when his laughter died away he turned serious. His eyes found the ground and he kicked his boot in the ash.

"Cale, back at the guildhouse… I feel bad about…" he trailed off, took a deep breath, and started again. "I thought we were dead, Cale. I mean, I wasn't trying to abandon you, I just-"

Cale knew what Jak intended to say. He stopped him with an upraised hand and a raised voice. "Dark, Jak, I know why you did it." He gave the tittle man a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Cale knew full well that Jak, of all people, would never abandon him, at least not out of fear. Cale would not have the little man feeling guilty for doing something that most any man would have done. Cale knew too well the way guilt burdened a man's soul.

"I'd have done the same thing," he said, and meant it "I thought we were dead too. I get Jucky*

Jak looked up and gave him a grateful, sheepish nod. "But we aren't," he said with a smile, "Dead, I mean.";|

"No, we aren't" Cate looked^uwoa amp;toeltto^the ‹i first time the desolation that sunwunded them. On all 4fj sides, a wasteland of gray extended for as far as he J could see in the gloom. A whirlpool of emptiness hung I in the gray sky just over the horizon tine. A giant gate,'t he realized.!*

"Where in the Nine Hells are we?"

"Not the Nine Hells," Jak replied matter-of-factly. "The Abyss. At least I think." He nodded at the demon's corpse. "This is its home plane. Yrsillar's home plane too, I assume."

Hearing Yrsillar's name sent a wave of anger through Cale. He quelled it and tried to absorb what the little man had said:

He knew of the Abyss only through adventurers' stories. Stories which always portrayed it as a chaotic place teeming with demons and alive with unspeakable horrors. This place, on the other hand, seemed utterly dead.

Jak pulled out his ivory-bowled pipe and chewed its end, though he didn't light it.

"This isn't what I would've expected," Cale said after a moment. "Where are all the demons? The tortured souls writhing in agony? Surely Yrsillar and this thing," he pointed with his blade at the demon's corpse, "can't be the only creatures that live here?"

Jak shruggeTi thoughtfully. "Maybe they are. The Abyss is made up of lots of different planes and this is an unusual one. The energy here seems to drain away life the instant it appears. Most everything that travels here would be dead in minutes, even most demons." He nodded at the shadow demon's corpse. "Creatures like that can obviously live here, or like Yrsillar. Certain kinds of undead too, I suppose. Those kinds of creatures don't live like you and I live. They unlive. We'd be dead long since if not for the protective spells."

Cale winced, once more reminded of Mask's seeming beneficence, once more reminded of the call. The felt mask in his pocket weighed like a stone.

Only when and if I'm ready, he thought to the Shadowlord. Stop pushing.

"Can we get out of here?"

Jak took his pipe from his mouth and regarded Cale with raised eyebrows. 1 dont know."

Cale appreciated the frankness. The gate?"

Jak eyed the empty air above Cale' a head. "That's where it materialized, but it must be one-way only. It doesn't even appear on this side unless someone is passing through from the other side." Seeing Cale's frown, he added, "Maybe there's another one somewhere else."

Maybe. Frustration and anger rose in Cale like a red tide. That they could have come so far only to die in this damnable extra-planar desert enraged him. He would not let Yrsillar win, he could not. Not after what had been done to Thazienne and Stonnweather. The demon would pay, by Mask.

By Mask? He gave a slight start, surprised at himself.

"You all right?" Jak asked.

Cale took a deep breath, quelled his frustration and his surprise. Anger would not get them out of here. "I'm all right," he replied.

Jak nodded, pulled his pipe from between his teeth, and placed it back in his belt pouch. "Cale, whatever we're going to do, we've got to do it soon. I don't think our protective spells are going to last very long. At least mine won't."

Cale ignored the implication in Jak's last statement. "Let's get moving then," he said. "We've got to find a way back to the guildhouse-"

Without warning, the "arth buckled and roiled like the storm-tossed whitecaps of Selgaunt Bay. Cale's vision blurred. The world spuau^Otee Ia"S^pe dissolved into a gray haze. Unbalanced, his stomach churned and his knees buckled. He struggled to stay upright. He felt himself streanuag forw"Ed^t?R^gh space, out of control. The blurry landscape whipped past, a continuous sheet of indistinguishable gray. He felt sure that at any moment he would be slammed into the side of a basalt slab and pulverized. He tried to speak but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.

"Jaaalllkk!"

As though through a howling wind, he heard Jak's poorly articulated reply. "Caaee!!" The little man was still with him.

He couldn't turn his head to look at Jak, could hardly keep his feet under him.

Without warning, the sensation of motion ceased.

Cale bent over double from the abrupt stop, gasping, but managed to keep his feet by catching himself with a palm on the ground. Beside him, Jak stumbled willy-nilly across the planked floor and slammed against the wall. He recovered himself quickly and looked around, wide-eyed and gasping. Only then did their location hit Cale.

Ploor?Wall?

Floor and wall indeed. He looked around in disbelief. -What in the Hells?"

"Burn me," Jak oathed.

They stood in the guildhouse. Or at least, they stood in something that looked very much like the guildhouse. Planked floors, rough-hewn stone walls and stairs leading down to a basement. The whole building was composed of the drab, gray color of the void, as though the guildhouse had been remade with the stuff of the Abyss. Reeling, Cale struggled to comprehend what had happened. He turned circles and gawked.

"Dark," Jak breathed. "What happened?"

Cale placed his hands on his hips and shook his head, dumbfounded. "I don't know. Where are we, Jak?

"How should I kn-"

Jak's abrupt stop pulled Cale around in alarm. He turned to see Jak's eyes glued to the demon's corpse on the floor. The same demon's corpse. Relative to Cale and Jak, the twisted body lay exactly where it had been previous to the motion.

"How-"

Jak waved Cale silent, eyes still on the demon. "Let me think a minute."

Cale watched his face and waited, and wondered. How did the demon's corpse move with us? What was going on?

So far as he could tell, the abyssal guildhouse seemed an exact copy of the real guildhouse. To be safe, he drew his long sword and kept his eyes on the stairway above and below.

"Gods, Cale," Jak said. "I don't think we've moved!"

Cale turned around to face him. "What?"

"We haven't moved," Jak said again, nodding. "I'm certain of it."

Cale didn't get it. They had been in a desert, and now they were in the guildhouse-of course they had moved.

"How can we not have moved? I felt us move."

"That wasn't motion," Jak replied. "It was… reality changing."

Involuntarily, Cale's eyes fell to the demon's corpse- exactly the same distance and direction from him as it had been before. He pulled his waterskin from his belt and had a gulp, glad now that he had thought to bring water. "What do you mean?" He offered the skin to Jak but the little man declined.

"This plane is nothingness, Cale," Jak explained. "Literally, nothingness. The gray wasteland from before-that was me. I expected the Abyss to be a wasteland and it was. The plane shaped itself to my expectations. Or my expectations shaped the plane. You see? Just before the guildhouse appeared-"