Dawn of Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

shirt. He spoke the command word and the tip glowed blue. The light did little to dispel the darkness.
    “Listen to me,” Cale said to all of them. “I brought us here and I will get us back. I just need some time to figure out—” to figure out what I am, he thought-“to figure out how.” He looked at each in turn. “Well enough?”
    Jak nodded. Riven said nothing, merely stared at Cale appraisingly. Magadon adjusted his pack and said, “Well enough.”
    “Now let’s get the Nine Hells out of this bog,” Cale said. Jak brightened at that. Magadon grinned.
    “Which way?” Jak asked, and held his wand above his head as though it would better pierce the twilight. It did not. “I can’t see anything worthwhile in any direction.”
    Cale looked to Magadon and said, “You’re our guide.”
    Magadon’s pale eyes glowed in the twilight.
    “I should have charged you more than three hundred gold,” he said with a chuckle.
    Cale could not quite bring himself to smile in response. “Which way, Magadon?” Cale asked instead. Magadon concentrated for a moment, and a nimbus of
    dim light flared around his head.
    “That is north,” he said when he opened his eyes, nodding in the direction behind Cale. “As good a direction as any. Follow me, and step where I step until we’re clear of the bog.”
    With that, they geared up and Magadon set off. His
    long strides devoured the distance. Tedium devoured the hours. More than once Magadon steered them away from a path that ended in a sinkhole or bog pit. Without the psionic woodsman to guide them, Cale had little doubt the swamp would have killed them all.
    As they journeyed, Cale glimpsed small, furtive creatures at the edge of his vision, apparently drawn to Jak’s light. They always darted away into hidden dens and burrows before Cale could clearly see them. Instead, he caught only flashes of twisted bodies, gangly legs, and malformed heads. He felt their eyes upon him as he passed. Calls like curses, alien screeches, chatters, and howls sounded in the twilight behind them. With Jak’s blue-light wand cutting a dim path through the shadow, Cale imagined they must have stood out like a goblin in a gnome delve.
    They walked the hours in silence. Throughout, the darkness was unrelenting. Shadows saturated them, clung to them like oil. Even their clothes seemed to be absorbing the pitch. Once blue cloaks faded to gray, green tunics to black. Moods too went from dark to darker. Cale saw in the transformation of their clothing an uncomfortable metaphor for his soul.
    His soul—villendem, in Chondathan. He wondered if the transformation had stripped him of it.
    No, he thought, and shook his head. I’m still myself.
    But he wasn’t himself, and something deep in his consciousness, some black, secret part of his brain, protested against his obstinate refusal to accept the truth. He fought down the feeling and put one foot in front of the other.
    Later, Jak slipped beside him and said in a low tone, “I know what you said earlier, Cale, but I think this is worse than anywhere we’ve ever been. Even worse than when we were in the Abyss. That was evil through and through. You could feel it, so it was easy to keep yourself separate from it. This place, it seeps into your skin. I feel awash in it. It’s almost…”
    “Seductive,” Cale finished for him.
    Jak looked at him sharply, worry in his eyes.
    “I was going to say, ‘insidious.’” The halfling touched his arm and added, “Cale—”
    “I know.”
    “Don’t get comfortable here,” Jak said. “Don’t.” “I won’t.”
    But Cale already was comfortable there, and that frightened him.
    *****
    Events were proceeding as Vhostym had foreseen. With his slaadi about their appointed task in the Underdark, he would hasten the Weave Tap’s production of a second seed. For that, he would have to feed the artifact, fertilize it—and the Weave Tap benefited from only specialized kinds of fertilizer.
    Just as Shar