Free Book 2 - She Is The Darkness by Glen Cook Page B

were longer still.
    The fireflies went mad. Every single ball launched darted
downward after a shadow. Each made its dip nearer shore.
    “Lots of shadows,” Croaker observed laconically.
This was a new thing but a thing we had feared for years. Shadows
attacking in waves and a flood instead of sneaking around like
spies and assassins.
    The Old Man seemed calm. Me, I damned near drizzled down my leg.
I ran, but only far enough to get hold of the standard and a bundle
of bamboo. I planted the former beside the Old Man, got the
business end of a pole pointed southward, found the handgrip
trigger mechanism and started turning. Each quarter turn sent
another fireball streaking. I told Thai Dei, “Grab you some
bamboo, brother. You too, uncle. This isn’t going to be
anything you can stop with a sword.”
    Balls were arcing over from the far slope now. There were enough
in transit to define the wave of darkness headed our way. Fireballs
plunged into that darkness like bright hail, flared, faded. This
was the nightmare tide we had dreaded for so long, the hellpower of
the Shadowmaster unleashed.
    Balls consumed shadows by the thousand. The flood came on.
Unlike mortal soldiers those things could do nothing but follow
commands. Sorcery compelled them.
    My pole went dry. I grabbed another one. Uncle Doj and Thai Dei
began to grasp the situation. They found poles and got into the
act, though Thai Dei was not very fast one-handed.
    The dark tide came off the water and headed upslope. As it drew
closer I began to make out individual shadows.
    I saw these things first way back when we first came to Taglios,
in the days when there were four Shadowmasters and together they
could reach a lot farther than could Longshadow now. The skrinsa
shadowweavers came north to kill us. They failed. But in their time
they used small shadows, few bigger than my fist. I never saw one
bigger than a cat.
    Some in this flood dwarfed cattle. Those absorbed fireballs with
no apparent effect. I saw dozens survive multiple hits. I muttered,
“Maybe Lady wasn’t as clever as she thought.”
    Croaker replied, “Think what it would be like without her
cleverness.”
    We would be dead already. “Got you.”
    Closer. Closer. The dark wall was but a hundred yards distant
now, the shadows far fewer in number and moving slower but
relentless nevertheless.
    Now the wagons could not depress their aim low enough to hit the
shadows. They shifted their attentions to that island.
    Uncle Doj shouted, drew Ash Wand. I have no idea what he thought
that would do to the huge clot of darkness racing straight toward
us while a swarm of small shadows scurried around it like
frightened offspring. No sword held any power against this
darkness.
    I tried to burn a hole through the clot’s heart, poised on
the brink of panic.
    Death ravened closer and closer.
    Balls from the rear began falling around us as little shadows
slithered in amongst the rocks.
    The screams began.
    The dark mass became a bonfire as fireballs hammered it. It
slowed, slowed some more, but never stopped coming. It reared like
a boar grizzly issuing his challenge. I spun my hand grip hard,
yelled some kind of nonsense. That killer slice of hell’s
breath strained to get at me but could not. It was as though the
thing, at the last instant, had encountered some invisible and
unbreakable barrier.
    The darkness radiated a dank psychic horror I imagined went with
the grave, a hunger known only by things undead, an odor of the
soul I remembered from too many bad dreams about bone-strewn
wastelands and old men bound up in cocoons of spun ice. My terror
grew stronger. I yanked at my handgrip long after my pole went dry,
long after there was no more reason to crank.
    The shadow kept trying to get to me until the barrage of
fireballs consumed its last whisper of darkness.
    The excitement faded quickly. Only balls launched toward the
island found many targets.
    The rock outcrop was taking a pounding from