Dawn of Night by Kemp Paul S Page B

shadows that clung to their ankles and hid their feet. He shook his head frequently to clear it. The waist high shadow fog was everywhere. But hadn’t it only been at his knees moments ago?
    Jak couldn’t see more than three paces in any direction. He was so tired that he felt as though the fog was clutching at him, turning him, forcing him to go only one way.
    Magadon stopped, looked around at the crypts, and said in a whisper, “We’re walking in circles.” When his companions said nothing, the guide shook his head and said it again, more loudly. “We are walking in circles.”
    His voice sounded muted in the fog, deadened.
    For a moment, it was as though no one other than Magadon could speak. It took several heartbeats for the guide’s meaning to register with Jak. When it did, Jak could not fathom how the guide could have determined what he claimed. The crypts all looked the same to Jak, the trees, the grass. But Magadon knew what he knew.
    At last, Cale asked in a dull voice, “Are you certain?”
    “Yes,” Magadon said, but then shook his head in confusion. “No.”
    “It’s the shadows,” Jak managed to say, and his tongue felt thick and unwieldy. “The fog.”
    Somehow the shadow fog had dulled their perception, had begun to siphon away their vitality.
    The realization itself helped to clear Jak’s head. It was as if a spell had been broken. His companions too seemed to recover. Gradually, each began to blink away the torpor and looked around with a more alert expression. The world suddenly came back to life and motion. Jak realized that the rain was still falling. It had never stopped! Thunder rolled in the distance. Jak felt as though he was awakening from a dream, or a three-night ale binge. He was so cold that his teeth were chattering.
    “What in the Hells just happened?” Riven growled.
    Though the magical effect of the shadow fog appeared to have diminished, the fog itself still enshrouded them. Jak’s blue light wand barely penetrated it. The tombs nearby faded into nothingness in its swirl of gray and ink. Tendrils of a deeper darkness ran through the mist and whirled around their legs and torsos like living things, pawing at their boots, steering them-Steering them.
    Jak took a step to his right and found that the shadows resisted him, then gently pulled him forward. His heart hammered.
    “Light, Magadon!” he said over the rain. “Anything you have! Now!”
    Jak didn’t wait for the guide to respond. He quickly mouthed the words to a temporary light spell and focused it on the end of his blue-light wand. A globe of radiance took shape at the wand’s tip. Magadon too acted quickly—almost simultaneously with the completion of Jak’s spell-and a nimbus of white light flashed around the guide’s head and a ball of white fire formed in the air above him, adding its own luminescence to that of Jak’s spell.
    The fog tendrils that had coiled around their bodies jerked backward from the sudden radiance, like a hand
    that had grasped a hot kettle. A palpable tremor rippled through the haze, and for a few heartbeats the light knifed through the otherwise impenetrable darkness and fog.
    In that combined flash of light, Jak saw that the tendrils within the shadow fog were composed of a network of red and black veins, each as fine as a child’s hair, each slowly pu I si ng. Just as that registered, a horrifying chorus of unearthly moans answered the light from behind them. The sound sent a chill down Jak’s spine. He whirled around—
    “Dark and empty!” he oathed.
    Under cover of the fog and the mind-numbing spell, a host of dark figures had assembled behind them. They had gathered in an arc perhaps thirty paces away, some on the ground, others hovering in the air. Each was a roughly man-shaped outline of darkness, black as pitch, with coal red eyes that flared from the inky holes of their heads. A wave of cold went before them like a deep-winter gale. Behind the assembled mass of undead,