Jak bristled and pointed his pendant at Riven's chest.
"My mother made potato stew, Zhent," said the halfling. "Hot soup warms the soul, she used to say. Probably little help to you, seeing as how you're a soulless bastard. You're welcome to your rations, if you'd rather."
That last statement caused Riven to keep behind his teeth whatever retort he might have been considering. Cale grinned.
Smiling himself, Magadon removed several small, wooden bowls from his pack and used them to start serving the stew.
"Your mother was a wise woman, Jak," the guide said through his mirth, and gave the halfling the first steaming bowl of stew. "And you'll have to forgive Drasek for his words." He winked at the halfling and said, "He had no real mother, of course, being the spawn of ice and molasses. Which explains why he grew up to be cold and thick."
Cale laughed aloud.
Jak chuckled, eyed Riven with distrust, and said, "Slippery and dark, more like."
Riven scowled at the halfling, but nevertheless held out his hand for a stew bowl.
"That was a poor jest when you first made it years ago, Mags," the assassin said.
"Poor?" Magadon asked, and ignored Riven's outstretched hand in favor of Cale.
Cale sipped the thick soup. It was tasty.
Magadon continued, "That half-orc and his fellows would have pummeled you to gruel. That jest saved your life."
"Theirs, more likely," Riven said, and Magadon cocked his head to concede the point.
Jak, continuing to chuckle, said, "Cold and thick. That's good. Very good."
"That's enough, Fleet," Riven barked, but Cale heard the smile behind the words. "Now give me some of that godsdamned stew, Mags, before I pummel you to gruel."
The woodsman did, and for a time the camaraderie of the road and the warm food chased the shadows. But only for a time. After the meal, the weight of the plane and the chill of the swamp once again descended.
They huddled around Jak's bluelight wand saying nothing, suddenly exhausted. Magadon had selected a campsite within a stand of the brooding, cypresslike trees common to the swamp. To Cale, it felt like the trees were watching them, the leaves whispering evil words.
After a time, he said, "I'll take first watch. All of you, get some sleep."
* * * * *
The next "day" seemed much like the one before-chilly, wet, and gloomy. They slogged alternately through knee deep, black water, soggy vegetation, and mud that stank like the worst of Selgaunt's sewers. Wisps of shadowy fog hovered over the land like dark tendrils squeezed from the saturated earth. Uncomfortably, they reminded Cale of the squirming tentacles from the Fane that had effected his transformation into a shade.
A few hours into the day's trek, Magadon said to them,
"The ground is rising and less saturated. We'll clear the swamp before this day is over. I'd wager on it."
"You never were a good gambler," Riven grumbled.
Magadon grinned.
For his part, Cale could see so no end to the bog in sight and felt no change in the ground. It just felt like the same mud. Still, he felt comfortable trusting Magadon's expertise and he continued to trek on.
Without warning, a wave of terror washed over Cale. His breath caught and he could hear his heart thumping in his ears. Sweat formed on his brow. To judge from the look of wide-eyed alarm on his comrade's faces, they all felt something similar.
The swamp fell silent around them. Even the ubiquitous flies had vanished.
Cale put his hand to his blade hilt and looked around, his gaze darting from pool, to reeds, to trees. He saw nothing amiss, except that each of his comrades had gone ashen. The feeling of terror lingered.
"What is this?" Magadon asked softly, his voice tense.
The guide unslung his ashwood bow, drew an arrow from his quiver, and scanned the swamp. Pools of black water stood to either side of them, steaming in the humidity. The dark trees of the swamp loomed like watchtowers.
Jak and Riven went back to back and drew their blades. Jak let out a sharp breath that sounded like a hiss. Magadon and Cale too closed ranks. Cale's hand stayed on his sword hilt but he did not draw. He looked around, but still saw nothing. He listened, but heard only the rapid respiration of his companions. The water around them remained still; too still. A blanket of shadowy mist pooled around their knees.
"There!" said Magadon, pointing his bow to the sky. "Above us."
Gazes followed the point of the woodsman's knocked arrow.
Against the backlit sky, one of the clouds, smaller than the others and darker, slowly wheeled a circle. Even as they watched, it veered in their general direction.
"Trickster's toes," Jak oathed, squinting. "What is that?"
With his enhanced vision, Cale could see that what they were looking at was not a cloud at all. It was a pool of writhing shadows-semi transparent to his transformed eyes. Within it, he saw the source of their magically induced terror.
"Kill the light!" he hissed. "Now."
Jak could not have missed the urgency in Cale's voice. Asking no questions, the halfling spoke a word in his own tongue and the wand's glow ceased.
"We can't see more than fifteen paces, Cale," Riven growled, still eyeing the sky.
Cale knew, but their only hope was that the creature in the sky had not noticed them.
"Quiet," he ordered.
Nearby stood a cluster of thin-leafed, droopy-limbed trees-not the cypresses, but they would be enough to hide them.
"Those trees directly to our right," Cale said. "Go now. As fast and as quiet as you can."
They must have heard the alarm in his tone, for they sheathed their weapons and darted off without comment. The splashing water rang like a gong in Cale's ears. Twice Jak fell in the water, and each time Magadon and Cale pulled him back to his feet. Somehow, Cale seemed faster than usual. He actually had to slow down to not outpace his comrades. As he ran, he prayed to Mask that the huge creature soaring overhead would not notice them. He imagined its dark eyes boring into his back. He looked ahead to the trees, willed them all to run faster, sensed a space between the shadows, and-
-he felt a moment's disorientation, a transitory rush of air, and-
-he was there!
Cale stood in the copse, well ahead of his comrades.
Somehow, he had stepped instantly from one shadow to another, seemingly without passing through the intervening space.
Dark and empty! he thought.
He had no time to consider his newfound ability. He stepped out from under the cover of the tree's low boughs and beckoned his comrades on.
"Faster," he hissed.
They had stopped, dumbfounded at his sudden disappearance and reappearance so far in front of them. They again began to run in earnest.
The cloud circled above them, a giant, scaled vulture swathed in shadows. The creature began to descend.
Cale reached for his holy symbol, but realized that he didn't have one. Instead he put his hand to his blade hilt. He drew it a fingerwidth and hesitated. He had not yet drawn it in on the Plane of Shadow and he felt that to do so somehow would be to surrender something that he could not quite articulate. Reluctantly, he removed his hand.
His comrades, wet and winded, streamed into the copse and ducked under the sheltering boughs. There they waited, ankle deep in the soft earth, stink, and water. The leaves and darkness enshrouded them.
"Quiet," Cale whispered, then he listened and watched.
He willed the shadows around them to darken slightly and much to his surprise, they did.
Riven, standing beside him, whispered, "Bad?"
Cale nodded. It could not be worse. He looked out of the copse and saw nothing. The tree limbs obscured his vision, but he could not miss the creature should it come near.
Magadon touched the tip of his arrow to his head and it began to hum lightly. He re-knocked it.