Dawn of Night by Kemp Paul S Page A

Fleet. Now—” and his eye narrowed-“put me down.”
    Cale’s expression did not change, but he shoved the assassin away.
    Riven kept his feet, chuckled, straightened his cloak, and turned away.
    “Whoreson,” Jak said to Riven’s back.
    “No, he’s right,” Cale said. “I’m losing focus. I feel like I’m in deep water, Jak.”
    The halfling felt the same way. He took a protective step closer to his friend as they continued on toward the crypts.

CHAPTER 6: THE DEAD OF NIGHT
    The air grew darker as they neared the cemetery. It felt almost too thick to breathe, almost viscous. The buildings grew more and more blasted as they closed on the necropolis’s perimeter wall. It looked to Jak as though the eye of an unimaginable storm had sat over the cemetery, leaving it in calm even while destroying the rest of the city.
    Jak’s blue-light wand illuminated little more than five paces. With each step, the sensation of being watched grew stronger in the halfling. The rain had grown colder.
    Jak realized that the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. He took out his holy symbol and held it in the same hand as the blue-light wand.
    “Strange to have a cemetery in the middle of town,” Magadon observed.
    “Originally, it was a commons,” Cale replied over the rain. “In the final years, the inhabitants converted it to this. They wanted a cemetery within the walls, to keep their dead close. They thought that would keep them from rising. After the darkness had consumed them all, Kesson Rel returned and opened a gate in the midst of the graves. He wanted to taunt the dead with a means of escape that they could never avail themselves of.”
    Jak didn’t bother to ask how Cale knew what he knew.
    “A gate? he asked.
    For a moment, Cale looked as though he had surprised himself.
    He nodded and said, “Yes. The light is a gate. But I… I can’t remember to where it leads.”
    Jak accepted that and kept moving.
    Before them stood the low, crumbling stone wall of the cemetery. Jak felt as though that weatherworn wall demarcated more than merely the borders of the graveyard. Beyond the wall was a large expanse, overgrown with weeds, trees and tall grass, and dotted with denselypacked crypts and statuary.
    They walked between two obelisks—the metal gate that once joined them lay twisted and broken nearbyand entered. It seemed to Jak that things went quieter the moment he passed through the gate.
    To Jak’s eye, all of the crypts appeared roughly similar-small, rectangular mausoleums of cut stone with pitched tops-though they varied in size and detail work. Most would have housed several dead, families perhaps. All had writing engraved into their face and tops, a jagged script that was faded and alien to Jak. Most had at least one statue of a winged woman on them, no doubt Elgrin Fau’s patron goddess of the afterlife. Typically, she perched at the apex of the roof over the sealed door of the crypt, though she sometimes flanked the doors. Sometimes she cradled a body in her arms, and sometimes she was empty-handed.
    Jak was amazed at the amount of resources the people of the city had committed to burial.
    As they moved deeper into the graveyard, a fog began to form around their feet—a soup of gray mist and dark shadows. The rain slowed to a drizzle, then finally stopped. Even the thunder went quiet. The atmosphere seemed pensive, ominous.
    Magadon called frequent halts, as though he saw or heard something, but then restarted the march. Jak heard nothing unusual, though his head felt muzzy. The wet must have been getting to him, but he forced himself forward.
    The necropolis seemed to go on forever and fatigue gradually took its toll. Jak’s legs hung from his hips like tree trunks. His vision began to grow blurry. How long had they been walking? He’d been too long on that dark plane and it was draining him.
    In his dazed state, the halfling imagined deformed faces forming and dispersing in the wispy