"...ohhh, how de noble haf fallen. Wit all of your power and riches, and yet here you sit... guardian of dead and foolish thieves. HA!"

December was aware of N'Doki's presence even before the necromancer spoke. It was not a scent or a sound that betrayed him, but more of a vague foreboding that December could sense even when the necromancer cloaked himself in wind and shadows. N'Doki had been standing next to him for several silent minutes. Then, without cause, the necromancer stepped into the world and began taunting him with meaningless babble.

"You are not amusing," December finally replied. The part of his mind that was regulating the low-temperature field around him remained steady and undisturbed. The bodies of the Night's Bloom continued to chill in the almost-freezing air.

"Amusement is in de eye of de beholder," said N'Doki. December opened his eyes and saw the necromancer's smile. N'Doki was wearing a disguise of humanity that almost made him look normal. There was nothing normal about that smile, however. It was too wide, with far, far too many teeth. He winked at December.

"That is all this is to you," said December. He shook his head. "Amusement."

"You sound as if I should be ashamed."

"You should."

"I knew once a man who would not care about a town of fools... like dis one. He would lift not a finger to help dem... and would even hasten dere fate if it profited him... as de fate of fools often did."

"That man is no more."

"Oh? N'Doki moved closer, stepping over the chilled body of Emerson Shaw to stand next to December. "Is he truly gone?"

"Very much so-"

"-or is he like dis garden of corpses? Merely resting in a semblance of death... waiting for de breath of life to return once more. Mmm?"

"You wish to have this discussion with me again? Now?"

"Nooo, no discussions," said N'Doki. "Dat time has passed. For now. NOW... now comes de end game."

December paused. His old 'friend' was playing games again... and in truth, N'Doki never really STOPPED playing games. With him, it was always a question of which brand of amusement he'd chosen to inflict on those around him. December had seen them all, but despite years of being subjected to the necromancer's bizarre and often grotesque entertainments, December had no idea what N'Doki was up to now. That disturbed him.

"What are you up to, old man?" December growled.

"What makes you t'ink dat I-"

"Because Casey D'Arcy re-appeared several minutes ago... without Jeremiah Trisk. He seemed quite distraught about something."

"The realm of spirits is no place for a child-"

"Where is Trisk?"

"Trisk is a young spirit... he has expended much energy. He rests now-"

"With some help from you, no doubt."

N'Doki smiled.

"I ask again," said December. "What are you-"

"Perhaps dis one should be more concerned wit what our enemy plans... and not how N'Doki entertains himself."

"I have concern enough for both."

"No," N'Doki's voice had a sudden seriousness. "You do not. You know dat it will strike again."

"Of course."

"Yet d'ose who have fought and beaten it before are gone... dead... or sitting among de dead. You are not concerned dat de creature will strike now, while de town is most vulnerable?"

"It has already spent considerable energy attempting to beat us in the past. Even with the significant advantages of surprise and superior power, it has not been able to do so. I doubt it would waste further energy on a direct attack based on the mere semblance of vulnerability. After all, we have been vulnerable from the very beginning."

"Ahhhhh..." N'Doki placed one bony hand on December's shoulder, then leaned down to whisper. "What do you suppose it will do, den?"

"An indirect attack. That seems to be the creature's true nature. The magnification of its power seems to have made it foolish, but it will learn and-"

"Return to its true nature?" N'Doki said. "How... interesting..."

December frowned. He looked up at his mentor.

"How much of this have you planned?" he snapped.

"Planned! I am offended!"

"Indeed."

"I merely brought you here to witness... it was YOU who involved yourself in de affairs of fools-"

"Witness. That implies that you KNEW what we were dealing with from the beginning."

"Yes. But dat is not important."

"Lives have been lost-"

"-lives dat will not live to see what comes. You would deny dem dat mercy?"

"Mercy?" said December. "You speak the word as if you have no idea of your own true nature... Child of Spirits."

"N'Doki knows full well what he is. And what you are. So what of YOUR true nature... Son of Drya?"

"Irrelevant. This town... this massacre... is not about me. No matter how many lessons you try to weave into these events, this is-"

"EVERYT'ING has been about you! All of it! All from de beginning!"

"This is about Bephal-"

"You ARE Bephal!" N'Doki snapped. "N'Doki cannot make dis any simpler... you and dis town are one! What happens here-"

N'Doki stopped suddenly. He stood up straight, shrugged, and adjusted his robe.... a robe that was, in fact, not really there at all. Then he smiled.

"-I haf said enough," he said.

"More riddles."

"Dismiss my words if you will, but de final lesson is about to begin."

"The creature is about to strike?"

"Has already struck," said N'Doki. He chuckled. "Now what you do... what dese silly thieves risk dere lives to obtain... is meaningless. Necessary... but still meaningless."

N'Doki stepped over Harrison Blackshear's corpse and started to walk away... as if he had somewhere else to be.

"What do you mean?" December demanded. "Where are you going!?"

"To indulge my true nature," said N'Doki as shadows converged around him. "And enjoy de spectacle of history.... you DO remember what we learned about history... yes? Heh, heh... if not, you will... soon..."

---

"I hear they have this new thing now... for wells, I mean." Roff huffed noisily between words as he turned the wooden crank. In front of him, the thick wooden axle turned, and the bucket of water ascended from the depths of the narrow shaft. The bucket was heavy, and the mechanism that lifted it was driven by solely Roff's tired muscles... muscles that were unaccustomed to such purely physical tasks.

"What's that?" said Ingrid. She was standing nearby with more buckets... some of them already filled. The infirmaries were in constant need of fresh water, and since she had no skill as a healer, it was her job to fetch supplies. It was supposed to be HER muscles working the well's crank, but Roff... lacking anything else constructive to do... had come along and offered his meager services, for which Ingrid was mildly grateful. She was realizing that the 'mayor' was actually a nice man... if only he hadn't married that horrid bitch of a woman-

"A pump!" Roff's grunt disturbed Ingrid's thoughts. He groaned into the crank as he managed a few more turns. "Metal thing that sits on top of the shaft." He grunted again. "-Has this big lever on it, and you pump it up and down... nnnngh!... and water comes out in spurts."

"Sounds ghastly!" said Ingrid.

"Oh, no, no," said Roff. "Works a lot simpler than this monstrosity. I've never seen one, but my wife said she... she, uhhh...saw... uhhh... n-never mind."

Roff stared off into empty space for a moment, then redoubled his efforts to wind the bucket to the top of the well. He did so in silence, save for the occasional grunt of effort.

"I'm sorry about her," Ingrid lied. "I heard..."

"That thing," Roff mumbled. "...that damned thing under the ground...!" Roff leaned into the crank and used his weight to drive it once... twice... three more times around. The wooden bucket jerked into view. Ingrid leaned over the stone wall and reached for it. She drew her had back almost immediately.

"What's that smell?" Roff frowned.

It was a thick, weedy scent... like cut grass mixed with a faint hint of rotting meat.

"M-mister Roff?" Ingrid held up her hand. When she'd touched the bucket, her fingers had come away covered with a thick, reeking slime. The bucket was filled with it, and the wooden container dripped mighty globs of it back into the shaft. "This isn't water..."

Roff froze... the crank trembled in his hands.

But HE wasn't trembling.

The entire well shuddered. By the time Roff realized that it was not his own hands that were shaking, it was too late. A single greenish tentacle the thickness of a man's leg whipped out of the well, circled one of Roff's arms, looped once around his waist, and yanked him toward the well's dark mouth. Roff slammed sideways into one of the wooden posts supporting the crank. He grabbed it with his free arm and held on as the thing tightened around him-

"MISTER ROFF!" Ingrid drew her kitchen knife and attacked the thing, plunging her old blade into the root's meaty circumference.

"Run!" Roff wheezed. The root was contracting around his torso, squeezing the air right out of his lungs. "...run woman!"

"No!" Ingrid stabbed again, trying to free him.

"...Go!" Roff pleaded. His fingers began to slip away from the wooden post. "Go, before it-"

Roff's eyes widened as the root tightened its grip. He couldn't breathe. His face turned red, and his arm began to loose its grip. But his eyes still pleaded with Ingrid to save herself before it was too late.

"Hold on!" she said, now trying to cut her way through the root. "I think I've got it!"

A cluster of finger-sized roots exploded out of the watery darkness and slithered around her upper torso... entangling her like a net.

"...nnnn...." Roff moaned as the roots pulled her toward the opening.

Still holding her knife, Ingrid's mouth opened in a wide 'O' of terror-

---

"HELLLPPPPP!" Francesca screamed

The high-pitched wail came as a surprise... even to herself. Francesca D'Arcy couldn't see the knife that Marillius was holding behind his back. She hadn't yet discovered Dina's corpse half-hidden behind a table. She didn't know of the poison lingering in the old man's veins... or the murderous intent boiling beneath his odd smile. In truth, she had no idea what had happened... or what was about to happen.

But there was something in the old man's eyes. Something in his voice. Something dark and predatory... and familiar.

The scream came from somewhere else... some deep part of her mind that would read and, worse yet, recognize the look in the old man's eyes... the malicious smoothness in his voice...

She'd seen them before. And the last time...

...the last time...

"HELLLLPPPP!" She screamed. Marillius was still a few steps away from her... just out of slashing range. But at Francesca's unexpected cry, he sprang, bringing the knife around before him as he bore down on the woman and her son. Francesca jerked out of the way and spun toward the door.

-SLAM!

Marillius was there first. Instead of plunging the blade into her exposed back, he had shot past her... and was now blocking her exit.

The smile on his face was much, much worse than the knife in his hand. Much worse.

"Where you goin?" he said.

She backed away from him. Casey squirmed in her arms.

"...don't look at him," she told her son. She didn't want him to see what SHE was seeing. A monster. A human monster. Just like... just like the last time...

Francesca tried to remember where the back entrance was. She knew that there WAS one, but the last thing she needed was to run off at random trying to find it. He'd have her for sure, then.

"Why you runnin' away, girl?" said Marillius.

"L-Leave us alone! You're... you're sick..."

"Yes, I am," said Marillius. "Very sick. And do you know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of this place. It was my mistake... I'll admit it. I came here looking for a few pockets to pick and a few loose items to snag... but then I ended up playing hero to you bunch of sheep. Me. A hero. Yeah, I must BE sick. But suddenly I'm feeling much better... feeling more like myself than I've felt in... well, forever. I think that's worth a little celebration, don't you? And what's a celebration without ladies?"

The heel of Francesca's foot struck something on the floor. She glanced down and discovered it was Dina's head. It was still attached to Dina's body, but that didn't make the woman any less dead.

"You killed her!" Francesca

"Yeah. Ya got me. I killed her. But I'm beginning to see the error of my ways. She was kinda cute... a bit long in the tooth, but who am I to judge, eh? YOU, on the other hand... YOU, I don't think I'll kill... just yet. I mean... why waste all that young energy, eh?"

"Don't... don't hurt my baby?"

"Who? That kid hanging onto you pretending to be asleep? Naw, he'll just get in the way. He's got to go..."

"Casey!" Francesca hissed at her son. "Casey, do the magic! Use the magic, Casey!"

"I can't!"

Francesca ran, weaving between the tables of sleeping patients with Marillius behind her. She should have been able to outrun him, but when was carrying a child...

...and monsters... monsters were ALWAYS faster than people. It was some kind of universal law that Evil must always be faster and stronger and meaner...

She felt a fist curl around her hair and grab hold, snatching her head back so sharply that her neck nearly snapped. She stumbled, tripping over a foot deftly thrust in between her fleeing legs. Casey flew from her arms as Marillius snatched her back toward him. The back of her head hit the floor, and she saw bright flashes of wild, dancing lights-

The sound of tearing cloth drew her senses back to the present. The old man was cutting her... cutting her shirt off-

"No!" She screamed, slapping his face first with open hands, and then with closed fists. She squirmed, but the old man dropped one bony knee directly onto her stomach.

"UNGH!" She grunted as breath and energy fled her body, driven out by pain.

"Believe it or not," said Marillius. "Not ALL men like feisty women. So stop it or I'll slit your-!"

"Leave her alone!" Casey ran up behind Marillius and grabbed a double fist-full of the old man's hair. Marillius turned and slapped the boy, then... after a second thought... slashed at the boy's arm with his blade.

The knife came away red. The sharp knife had opened a deep wound across Casey's arm, just below the shoulder. Blood poured from the long, wide wound.

"CASEY!"

The boy retreated to hide beneath a nearby table. He clutched his arm, but blood dripped out from between his fingers.

"You hurt my baby!"

"He ain't gonna be the only one!" Marillius hissed at her.

"People heard me scream! They're coming!"

"They'll just have to wait their turn!"

Marillius finished ripping off her shirt. Then he put the knife down- just out of Francesca's reach. He closed his other hand around her throat.

"I wouldn't move too much if I was y-"

"MOMMA!"

Casey darted out from under the table and tried to tackle Marillius. The old man twisted and brought his fist across the boy's face. Casey crumpled to the floor-

Francesca reached for the knife, but Marillius-

-with a monster's strength and a monster's speed-

-was too fast. He grabbed her wrist and pinned it to the floor, then leaned over her.

The old man's leering face loomed over Francesca's...

...and suddenly his face began to change. Marillius's features swam across his skull like a twisted mage's illusion as Francesca's mind tried to retreat from what was about to happen-

-but it could not. It had already retreated... already pulled away from the unthinkable... and when it tried to do so again, it found itself staring into memories of what had driven it nearly to madness years before...

...before. The last time... the first time...

The face!

The face staring down at her now... dripping imaginary drool onto her cheeks... was not Marillius the old man. It was someone else now. It was...

"...no..." she cried. Tears streamed from her eyes as the memory flooded forth, overwhelming the horror of the present with a deeper, darker, even more horrible secret... "...no, please don't..."

"Crying?" said Marillius. His voice twisted by Francesca's mind into someone else's. Though he had only said a single word, Francesca had transformed it into the long, string of foul profanities that she had heard long ago... spoken in a voice that she dared not name... dared not even remember...

Until now.

"Get OFF of me!" Francesca shrieked. She fought back as she had the last time. Her free hand found her attacker's chest and she pushed. But this time, her attacker was a sick old man... and her arms were not those of a frail young woman. Her violent shove threw Marillius off balance for a second. His face vanished for a moment, and the tiny part of Francesca that was still in the present knew that this was her chance.

Shrieking incoherently, Francesca scrambled away from him, sliding across the bloody infirmary floor-

Marillius grabbed her foot. She drove her OTHER foot into his scowling faces... both of them: The real one, and the one she saw. She also reached for the knife... but it wasn't there. Marillius staggered to his feet, holding his hand over his bleeding face. The surgical knife dangled from the other hand.

"You HURT me!" he snarled. When he took his hand away, Francesca saw that she had broken his nose.

Francesca stopped screaming as the present settled around her again (though not completely). She gasped.

"Dammit, boy!" Marillius growled as he turned. He'd heard Casey behind him-

-but the thing behind him was not Casey D'Arcy. The boy was still on the floor, just waking up from Marillius's cruel punch. But in front of him... between Marillius and the boy.... was a monster.

A real one.

The pale thing was smaller than a man, with long, wiry limbs that ended in clawed fingers and toes. It was crouched low to the floor, with its prehensile tale curled behind it. J'Hasp's lips peeled away from his fangs in a dangerous snarl.

"Uhhhh..."

J'Hasp straighten himself, standing almost upright. His bulbous head came to Marillius's chin. Deep, animal eyes regarded the old man with a combination of anger and curiosity. Mostly anger.

"...uhhhh...." Marillius looked down at the knife in his hand, and then at the claws on the creature's fingers. Those claws weren't just there for decoration.

But then, this was just a SMALL monster... and it looked human enough, in a twisted, ugly sort of way...

"Man bad..." J'Hasp hissed.

See... it even SPOKE like a man! So then it would die like one, too!

Marillius slashed with his blade-

At first it looked like creature had just blocked his slash with its hand...

...but the blade hit the floor.

And then several of Marillius's fingers joined it, along with an unhealthy splatter of blood... a splatter that kept on splattering as Marillius beheld the chopped ruin of his hand. Everything above the wrist was either missing or mangled.

"...J'Hasp bad more..." said J'Hasp. The creature frowned at him.

At this point, Marillius had decided to run. But before the decision could reach his legs, something hit him. Hard. It felt as if someone had dropped a boulder on his upper torso-

"UHGH!" Marillius grabbed his chest. "...oh no..." he said as he felt his heart pounding beneath his ribs. Each thump sent a jolt of pain radiating across his chest and down his arm. The boulder got heavier... "...ugh..."

His old, tired heart beat harder and faster. The steady rhythm began to dissolve into a pounding chaos, like a half-dozen fists pounding on a single door. He stumbled as balance deserted him. The room swam, and darkness crept in around him.

...and then...

Nothing.

Marillius spent his last second of consciousness realizing that had actually FELT his own heart stop beating...

His bloody face slammed into the floor at J'Hasp's feet, and he did not get up. Ever.

Francesca saw her attacker collapse, but could take very little comfort in it. The door between madness and sanity had not been fully shut for a long time, but now... assaulted by one monster after another... after another... it was finally flung wide. Casey D'Arcy sat up and reached for his mother. Francesca turned her back on him and ran for the door.

She was not screaming yet, but when the door opened before she reached it and Floyd D'Arcy rushed in, a howling shriek of pure madness rolled off of her tongue as if she were trying to peel back his face with just the sharpness of her howling voice.

"Fran-" Floyd began, reaching for her as she ran past.

Francesca pushed him hard, sending him stumbling to the floor as she ran shrieking out into the street.

---

Ingrid felt one of her legs snap as she slammed into the stone wall surrounding the well. The web of tendrils gripped her head and chest like a fist, pulling her down. She was already bleeding from her efforts to free herself. She still had the knife, but now the sharp edge was red with her own blood as she continued to slash at the roots holding her, cutting her own flesh almost as often as the creatures. She'd managed to slow it down, but now pain shot up from her shattered leg. The knife almost tumbled into the dark well... but she kept her grasp. With her other hand she pulled at tore at the vile weeds ensnaring her. She slashed at her own face... more of the tendrils fell away, but then something tightened around her neck. She dared not slit her own throat, but maybe she could still free Roff before she blacked out. Grigory was barely managing to hang on-

She reached out and plunge her blade into the single large root that was holding him. The blade went in easily, but it wasn't enough. A knife wasn't going to help him OR her. She needed something bigger, like a-

Sword.

The long blade swung down hard, drawing sparks against the stone and slicing the tentacle that had been holding Grigory Roff. Roff dropped... bouncing painfully off of the stones and landing in the dirt. The sword... or perhaps a different one... then cut through the tendrils trailing from Ingrid's torso. Someone grabbed her. Someone big. And strong. She was being pulled away as two or three shapes began cutting the roots. More roots slithered out of the well, but the fuzzy, indistinct shapes of her rescuers wandered through the them as if they weren't there. Suddenly, she was free. She felt the ground beneath her, and then someone else was dragging her away. She tried to see who had saved her and Grigory, but... though her rescuers were still gathered around the well... she couldn't actually see them. They were just hazy shapes that seemed to fade in and out of focus. She saw a big man with a hammer... and another with two swords. And a small man with a knife and...

The knowledge that she was not about to die finally allowed the pain from her leg to reach her brain. The break was bad. Bones had pierced the flesh, and there was a bloody streak leading from her feet all the way to the well. She looked down and then everything went blurry. She felt the ground shake. Someone started shouting, and she saw something large lifting out of the well, destroying the crude axle and supporting beams...

Then everything faded to a soft, comfortable blackness.

"Here it comes," said the hazy, nondescript figure that resembled Yexhill Thane. The ground in front of him heaved upward suddenly, and then dropped, yielding a shockwave that demolished the well, shook the buildings, and threw the surrounding onlookers to the ground.

...except for Thane and the others, who rode the shockwave as if it were as and ephemeral as their own bodies appeared to be. As wood snapped and glass shattered around them, the ghostly Night's Bloom closed around the deep hole that had replaced the stone well. From the center of it rose a stalk-like column that at first looked like a tall, branchless tree. But the 'tree' began to undulate as it rose; its tapered tip curving downward toward the Night's Bloom almost as if it were looking at them. Dark green veins began to pulse along its thick hide... each throbbing silently to its own ominous beat.

"Hey look, I think it recognizes us!" said Emerson Shaw. His normally nasal voice was thinner and more distant, as if he were speaking from someplace far away.

"Yeah," said Hemingway. "We're the people it almost killed the last time."

"Well that was last time," said Harrison Blackshear. The ghost held two phantom swords, both already dripping with sap from the roots that had attacked Roff and the woman. Those small, weak tentacles had withdrawn... but the fight did not appear to be over. "Get the goodies ready, Shaw... it's time we put this thing to bed."

---

"Don't touch me!... Don't touch me!!...."

The small alley beside the infirmary was neither dark nor foreboding... but Francesca D'Arcy huddled trembling in its far corner as if it were besieged by walking horrors. She had curled herself into a ball and tried to wedge herself against the rear wall. Her arms were folded tightly over her face, but every few second she would peek out with one terrified eye...

She could see the street. Something was happening out there... people were running and shouting, and a second ago the buildings shook...

But to Francesca, all of that was happening in some distant place that didn't concern her. The people on the street sounded afraid, but they could not possibly know what fear was. They had not been there... they hadn't seen the monster's face... the face that was hovering over her even now.

Horrid fingers traced through her hair... the gentle caress of a-

"...don't touch me!" She spat.... her voice equal parts terror and anger. This was not real. This was just a memory. He wasn't here... wasn't here... wasn't here...

But he WAS here!

He WAS!

He was standing right there... touching here just like he had done before.

"...please..." she trembled. "...don't..."

She heard him step closer. Closer.... how much closer could he GET? He was already touching her-

...yes, he could get closer. Oh, yes...

Tears rolled from her eyes as her pleas to be left alone became sobbing squeals of terror.

He was going to touch her again.

And there was nothing she could do but let him. Just like last time. Just like THIS time...

"Stop," she heard him say. His voice made her muscles clench. "... you're hurting me..."

But no... that was not his voice. Those were not his words. SHE had said those words, but she wasn't saying them now. Was he mocking her? Of course he was. He'd done it before... mocked her... called her terrible names...

...but the voice? Who's voice was that?

Francesca opened one eye and peeked into the alley.

"Stop," said the shimmering haze that had gathered a few feet away from her. The blurry thing looked like a man... but it was not THAT man. This was something else...

...and so it was of no importance. Francesca closed her eyes and shivered as imaginary fingers traced through her hair, and ephemeral lips brushed her cheek.

"Dammit, woman!" said the stranger's voice. Francesca felt something grab her arm and yank it away from her face.

"It's like KNIVES in my brain! Either you STOP or I'll have to-"

"NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!" Francesca howled. "NO, don't touch meee!"

The shadow shuddered and stepped back... seeming to loose focus for a moment before pulling itself back together. The haze became almost a solid form now. Gallows clapped both hands to his head as if to block out the woman's psychic scream... but he couldn't. It was too much. Too much fear... too much chaos... His empathic talents had been drawn to her pain like a moth to a candle, but now it was threatening to consume him. Her insanity was like iron hooks sinking into his thoughts. He couldn't pull away. Deep down, the woman's mind knew that he was there. Her pain had grabbed him... it was dragging Francesca deeper into insanity, and it did not want her to go alone...

But Gallows didn't want to go back there again.

He approached her again, ghostly fists clenched. He was going to have to knock her out or kill her if he wanted a second's peace-

Francesca squealed and begged for mercy, her words becoming a flood of madness that-

"Wait minute..." Gallows frowned. "What did you just say?"

----

December was on his feet even before the first tremor had reached its full force. He hadn't been expecting another direct attack so soon... but as he turned toward the epicenter of the small quake, he saw that his logic had been flawed. The unexpected was indeed happening. Perhaps it was merely trying to restore its energies by feeding, but its attempt to snatch two townspeople down a nearby well had already been stopped by-

December glanced down, and then peered again across the hundred yards or so between him and the well. He'd been right the first time. The shadowy figures surrounding the well were the Nights Bloom, who seemed intent on battling the subterranean creature... without the benefit of their bodies. When the creature's single tubular stalk sudden swelled... pulsed... and then exploded into a cluster of smaller, faster tendrils, the Night's Bloom quickly converged on the well and began to beat them back while the few remaining onlookers scattered for cover.

"Interesting," December said as the battle unfolded. To call it a battle was almost improper, as the creature's attempts to strike were comically futile. The animated roots... some with poisoned barbs and others with enough strength to twist a man in half... passed effortlessly through the Hars and the others. But the ghostly weapons of Bephal's defenders were free to hack and crush the demon from all sides, quickly reducing the first wave of tentacles to a carpet of oozing green pulp. When the ground rumbled again, December expected screams from the surrounding buildings, since the creature would logically attack the clusters of undefended citizens and not waste time on unbeatable foes...

But the rough hole that had been the well began to widen like a mouth yawning open. Not one, but THREE columns of tightly-wound tentacles reached skyward and began thrashing violently as the earth continued to split apart. December saw Harrison Blackshear look back at him and then glance nervously down at the corpses cooling at December's feet. Then the fighting started again.

December's frown deepened. This wasn't making any sense. No sense at all. Perhaps the creature was trying to draw Trisk out of hiding, but-

"MASSSTER!" J'Hasp hissed urgently beside him. December had been aware of the creature's stealthy approach, but his attention had been... and still was... focused elsewhere.

"MASSTER"! J'Hasp repeated. The man-shaped thing fidgeted nervously. "BAD!"

"What is it..."

J'Hasp pointed a single curved claw at a nearby building. It was one of several shops that had been turned into hospitals for the wounded.

"BAD THERE!"

J'Hasp's ambiguous warning could have meant almost anything...

"Baaaaaad..." J'Hasp repeated, sniffing the air in the general direction of the infirmary. Then he made a low, ominous growl. "...like J'Hasp."

Clarity struck like a silent thunderbolt. December turned... his eyes returning to the Night's Bloom, and his thoughts to N'Doki's parting comment.

History. He had mentioned history.

December's thoughts peeled away the past few hours and returned to something that N'Doki had said even earlier.

History repeats itself.

...and then it all became depressingly clear.

Blackshear and the others were fighting a distraction. They were risking the decay of their physical forms for an objective that, while still necessary...

...was now of no importance whatsoever.

"DAMN!" December growled. "...nearly outmaneuvered by a plant!"

J'Hasp hissed and then quickly shuffled to one side-

"MASTER!"

December followed the curve of the creature's claw to the figures at December's feet-

-and found Gallows staring up at him.

"There's something you need to know," said the archer. Gallows tried to sit up... winced stiffly... and then completed the motion with considerable effort. "...ungh... gimme a minute..."

"Are the others able to-"

"Not without help," Gallows said. "I've had a bit of practice..."

"I trust your empathic abilities are intact?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"Because I have a task for you. For each of you... tasks which will require your unique talents."

"Empathy?"

"And your OTHER talents, Mr. Gallows."

"What other talen... Oh."

---

"Not that I'm complaining or anything," said Emerson Shaw. "But shouldn't we be getting back to our bodies before they... you know.... rot?"

"December's keepin' 'em fresh for us," said Harrison Blackshear. The ghosts spoke leisurely as they hacked their way toward the edge of the chasm that had sprung open in center of the street. Hars' swords moved without effort through both air and flesh... and a carpet of severed roots of all sizes lay behind him. "...and besides, I don't see any signs of N'Doki or Trisk. Without their magic, we're stuck this way."

"Not that that's such a bad thing," said Thane. Yexhill Thane wandered among the latest wave of grasping roots using one of Emerson Shaw's knives to cut anything foolish enough to get close to him.

"Speak for yourself," said Emerson. "I've had enough of being dead. I don't know how the REAL dead people do it!"

"But think of all the things you can steal like this, little brother," said Hemingway.

"Well..." Emerson stopped to think for a moment. "...I didn't say that there weren't advantages."

"I think maybe its time you broke out that secret weapon," said Hars.

"But you said to wait until Trisk told us how to-"

"Change of plans. The longer we stay dead, the less we'll like our bodies when we get 'em back. IF we get 'em back."

"But I don't know how to use this thing," said Emerson. The witch's hand... decades years old and still weeping blood... was wrapped in a scrap of burlap that Emerson had found. He unwrapped the grisly package and looked at it in disgust. It was so fresh that it was almost moving. "...wasn't there supposed to be a ceremony or something?"

"They said the witch's blood is poison," said Hemingway. "There aren't but so many ways to use a poison, ceremony or not."

"Try it and lets see if we went all that way for nothing!"

"We'd better not have..." Emerson raised his other hand... and clutched in his fist was a long, golden dagger. It resembled the enchanted blade that he had found in the tunnels beneath Bephal, but THAT dagger was still attached to his physical body's belt. The weapon he now held was merely a figment of his own imagination, as was the hand that gripped it. The only real objects among them were the bleeding hand of a dead witch... and the writhing tentacles of the creature she had summoned decades ago.

Emerson Shaw plunged the imaginary blade into the severed hand, slowly impaling it. When he drew the dagger out, the blade was covered with blood.

"This one"! Thane pointed to a two-foot diameter root that was attempting to attack Harrison Blackshear. Had Hars been alive, the tentacle would have slammed into him and crushed him against the ground.... but instead, it passed through the swordsman's ghostly body without resistance. Hars's imaginary swords, however, were not quite so harmless. With two almost simultaneous motions, he slashed root open along its flank. The plant-thing reared back and coiled upward, spraying the ground below it with thick sap.

Distracted... or perhaps unaware of what Emerson Shaw was planning... the creature didn't react to the thief's presence until it was too late. Shaw plunged his small dagger into the root's thick hide. A massive convulsion rippled down the tentacle's length as if something had exploded deep inside of it.

Then came the sound.

December could not hear it.

The townsfolk hiding in the buildings could not hear it.

Even J'Hasp's enhanced senses could only detect the faintest hint of vibration...

...but to the Night's Bloom it was like the howl of a hurricane. Somewhere far away, a man shrieked as if the skin were being torn from his body. And woven throughout his wail of agony was the all-too-human shout of a woman. More anger than pain, the woman's voice merged with the man's and became an entirely new sound... a sound that drilled into imaginary ears of the Night's Bloom like shards of glass.

Emerson Shaw clapped his hands to the sides of his head, trying to block out the sound. But he couldn't... because it wasn't a sound. It was something else... something that shook the ethereal plane like an explosion. For a moment, the Night's Bloom ceased to exist. Their ephemeral bodies flickered and faded as the scream(s) of the damned shattered their concentration. Shadowy forms blinking in and out of sync with the physical world, the Night's Bloom backed away... each one of them certain that Emerson's attack on the creature was the worst mistake they'd made so far... except, perhaps, for trusting N'Doki.

-and suddenly the screaming receded. It did not fade or die off, but instead it seemed to get more and more distant until they could feel it only as an echo in their thoughts. Soon that, too, gone.

When Emerson Shaw opened his eyes, he saw decaying carcass of a large, brown worm stretched across his field of vision. The tentacle he had attacked was dead. Its greenish tint was now a deepening brown that was spreading outward from the sunken, sizzling wound that he'd made with his dagger. The poison had already killed it, and now it was eating away at it like an acid.

All of the roots nearby were limp and motionless... strewn across the ground like entrails, without so much as a twitch to betray their former lethality. The one wound had killed almost a third of them, and had shocked the others into a stunned almost drunken state. The roots further away were still moving, but in slow, random undulations... bumping into each other and flopping to the ground as if they were too weak to remain animate.

"Do it again!" Hars ordered. "Before it recovers!"

"Like hell!" Emerson said, backing away. "That thing HURT! I'm not touching it again! YOU do it!"

"Bloody coward... give it here!"

Emerson tossed the witch's hand to Hars-

-but Hars never caught it.

A speeding blur sprang between them and snagged the bloody package the instant it left Emerson's fingers. J'Hasp landed at the edge of the chasm, clutching the witch's hand to his scrawny chest and looking back at the Night's Bloom.

"Hey!" Emerson shouted. "Give that back!"

"Is he evil again?" said Thane. "...please tell me he's not evil again."

J'Hasp hissed at them, and the intent was unmistakable.

Stay Back

"Brace yerselves, lads," said Hars as he backed away. "He's takin' that thing home."

J'Hasp gave them a final grunt, and then scurried down into the chasm that was already giving birth to a new cluster of thinner, faster tentacles.

"I think its waking up," said Thane.

"So we'd better keep it busy," said Hemingway. He raised his imaginary hammer. "...and hope it doesn't take us with it when it goes."

---

The soft gray daylight was gone almost instantly as the dark earth closed in. J'Hasp dropped deeper with out pause or hesitation. It would take mere seconds for the creature's eyes to adjust to near-perfect darkness, but those seconds were unnecessary. A thousand sounds, scents, and textures merged in the simple creature's brain, forming a detailed map of everything around him.

The place was a hive. Nets of roots and tendrils rose before him, clogging his intended path with the ominous motions and unpleasant scents. J'Hasp's claws dug into the wet, rubbery surface of the dead root beneath him. He could feel the pulpy flesh decomposing as he scurried forward, darting around to the root's underside. With the witch's hand clutched firmly in his teeth, J'Hasp darted around the cluster of tendrils and continued downward.

The plant creature had exploded upward through the old well, using its strength to shrug back the walls and widen the shaft into a cavern that narrowed rapidly as J'Hasp descended. The open space shrank around him. Tentacles slithered toward him from several directions, but they were slow and lazy...

J'Hasp was quick.

He darted back and forth between the loops of moving scents. He paused only once, and then only to gather strength to leap from the decaying root onto the wall. He wiggled past two large tentacles that could not coil around him fast enough to snag him. His claws slipped on the wall of mud and wet rock, but J'Hasp had not intended to stay where he was. He slid down, letting gravity take him past several curtains of sharp, slippery sounds. Tentacles with barbs. Yes, J'Hasp remembered those. He remembered what they smelled like... remembered the sounds they made when they moved....

He would Keep Away. They would not catch him this time.

With another leap, J'Hasp returned to the single dead root that the Small Loud Man had stabbed before. It was dead and would not move... and the roots around it were slower than the others. J'Hasp understood poison only in the sense that some things were Bad and should not be touched. J'Hasp could tell many Bad Things, but he couldn't understand why the bit of flesh he held in his teeth was Bad. But Master wanted it to be in the plant-thing's nest, and so J'Hasp would make it be there. The part of the plant-thing that had already touched it and died would lead him to the nest, and he would go quickly so that he could return and protect Master from Bad Things.

There were many Bad Things in the town now.

Very many Bad Things. J'Hasp had tried to warn Master, but J'Hasp didn't think Master understood. Sometimes Master did not understand the things J'Hasp told him. Maybe one day Master would be smart like J'Hasp... but until then, J'Hasp would have to fight away the Bad Things and protect him.

But first, he had to make this flesh be where Master wanted it to be...

The dead root twisted downward at a sharper angle, and now the accelerating decay had turned its previously-climbable surface into a thick mush. J'Hasp followed the trail of rotting goo to a hole at the bottom of the cavern. The sounds and scents of water reached J'Hasp's ears... as did the sound of many large and small things swimming below. Again, J'Hasp paused. He made an odd hiss as he blew the air out of his lungs while sealing off his nasal passages-

Invisible in the darkness, a row of small slits yawned open on opposite sides of J'Hasp's neck.

Now ready for the water, J'Hasp allowed himself to slide down and drop into the cool subterranean river.

The water tasted of Bad Things. He knew instinctively that he was now in danger. The roots could move faster in water than he could, but their movements were also betrayed over a larger distance. Violent disturbances in the water brushed against J'Hasp's skin, scales, and wet fur. J'Hasp dove, angling his bulbous head downward and kicking his clawed feet with rapid strokes. Something big stabbed past him in the darkness. The big thing kept going... on its way to the surface... but several smaller somethings peeled away from it and curved after him. J'Hasp twisted in the water and slashed with his claws. The roots were not expecting to be detected and attacked, so the creature was able to shred them easily before they could get him. J'Hasp angled back up and began zig-zagging his way upstream, following the large vein of rotting plant blood that he tasted in the water.

More things were closing in around him now. Movement was everywhere. The cold dead walls of the river bed were now neither cold nor dead... but alive with reaching and grasping things. The flow of the water became chaotic, not because he was being attacked... but because the river was having to flow around something large and irregular in its path. Something alive. J'Hasp could not see it, but whatever it was, it filled the river with the taste of Much Bad.

Now the roots were coiling around J'Hasp, circling his speeding form at a distance and then snapping tight. Something snared his legs. J'Hasp rolled and slashed.... his arm became tangled in a web of moving things. The web tried to break him, but J'Hasp's bones and joints were not as brittle as a man's. The creature's limbs yielded, twisting in their sockets until J'Hasp could slip free.... only to become entangled again by more roots. They were closing around him like a mouth.

This was Bad.

J'Hasp could not fail Master, but he could not maneuver as well underwater as he could in the air. Even if he escaped this latest net, the thing would only trap him again and again...

...the inter-connecting memories that went through J'Hasp's mind could not be properly called 'thought'... but it was very close. Recent events unwound past J'Hasp's mind and re-arranged themselves into something almost relevant. J'Hasp could draw no conscious conclusions from this new arrangement, for the drawing of conclusions was a thing that J'Hasp left to men like Master. But somewhere in the creature's strange mind, a new spark flared to temporary brilliance. J'Hasp saw the spark as a newly discovered instinct... although a man would probably call it an 'idea' or a 'plan'.

Even as J'Hasp's claws continued slashing at the things that he could feel but not see... the new 'instinct' made its way out of J'Hasp's brain. The creature's brain knew what he was about to do only an instant before it was done-

J'Hasp's jaws clenched tight, and his teeth dug into the package that he had been carrying for the master. J'Hasp's nose and mouth filled with flesh-taste as blood billowed around his head in a inky cloud.

Instantly, J'Hasp was free.

The roots snatched away from him as if his whole body had become red hot. Some retracted so fast that they spun J'Hasp around in the water. It took a second for the creature to regain his bearings. J'Hasp expected the roots to close in on him again while he found himself... but they did not. Though there was still movement all around him, the tentacles kept their distance. J'Hasp found the trail of plant-blood and Bad-Taste once more, and resumed swimming.

Nothing touched him as he made his way toward the heart of the Bad Taste. He had not been very far from it. Though he could not see it, J'Hasp could draw its shape in the water by its movements. The monstrous ball of undulating roots had fixed itself to the walls of the underground stream... stretching across from wall to wall like a cancerous tumor. The plant-thing did not have a mouth, eyes, or even a head... but it had a heart. Directly before J'Hasp churned a tight, gnarled, fist-like thing from which all of the other roots emerged. It was too big to merely lodge itself in place; instead, it had dug its tendrils into the rock and actually widened the river bed, creating a massive egg-shaped chamber that resembled a place that J'Hasp had been before.

J'Hasp remembered that place. It was filled with strange roots that had made J'Hasp do Very Bad Things. There were roots in this place too. J'Hasp could feel them wiggling out of the water digging up through the stone to the place where the sick men were.

Very Bad Things would be happening there very soon.

And Master was up there all alone.

Snarling, J'Hasp dove toward the thickest cluster of roots. He bit down harder on the severed hand, and-

-the hand moved. The witch's severed hand clenched into a fist and then began squirming violently in J'Hasp's teeth.

Startled, J'Hasp jerked back and let the unexpectedly mobile hand jet from his mouth. The hand did not fall... but instead, J'Hasp's senses tracked its smooth, almost floating path toward the plant-creature's heart. But that was not all he sensed. The water was filled with another Bad Taste. This one was not plant-blood... but something else. A subtle taste of sour and rot that was not actually a taste at all. It was more of a tingling at the edge of J'Hasp's senses. J'Hasp knew this taste... this smell... this thing...

HE was here.

The Bad Man.

The Bad Man that Did Not Like J'Hasp.

The Bad Man Who's Magic Tasted like Rot.

The Bad Man that Master called END-OHH-KEE...

He had not been here before, but now the stench of death-magic was strong. J'Hasp twisted back and forth, trying to tell where the magic was coming from...

...somewhere close.

The water began to churn as the witch's hand drew closer to the creature. The river... and then the walls themselves began to tremble. Rocks tumbled from the ceiling as the creature tried to pull itself away from the tiny, insignificant-seeming clump of human flesh that was floating gently toward it.

And then came the words.

Dark, ugly words that came through the churning water as clearly as through still air. Words that dripped with death magic.

Energy spread through the water like a poison. N'Doki was casting a spell, and the plant creature did not like it.

Neither did J'Hasp. At first J'Hasp merely backed away, but as the taste of N'Doki's magic fouled the water... and the shuddering of the plant-creature increased... his instincts told him that it was time to leave. Quickly.

Master had told him to make the flesh-thing be in the creature's lair, and he had done so. Master had not mentioned anything about EndOhhKee... but then, Master rarely did. J'Hasp swam away as the necromancer's chant came to a sudden halt. A shudder of magic went through the water, and then-

J'Hasp squealed as all of the water around him turned to blood.

---

"Roff!"

"I'm okay, I'm okay!" Roff stammered as they dragged him into the old bakery. Roff had no idea whether he was okay or not... he was still in shock from being nearly crushed to death mere seconds before. The few parts of his body that didn't hurt like hell were all numb. He looked around and saw that there was blood on the ground, but he couldn't tell if it was his or Ingrid's... "I'm okay!-"

A crowd of people crowded into the infirmary after him... but they weren't there to help. They were there to hide. The floor shook once, then shook again. People started to scream.

"What's happening!" Roff shouted. The people who had dragged him in released him, and when he tried to get up, someone pushed him down and started tearing at his clothes.

"...ribs might be broken..." he heard someone say. He couldn't see who was talking, because his vision began to blur.

"I'm not dying, am I?" He asked.

"Shut up and sit still" somebody snapped. The door opened and still more people rushed in... some nearly tripping over him. Then Roff heard furniture being slid across the floor.

"What's happening outside!? What's happening!?"

"It's attacking again!"

"I know that!" said Roff. "What's happening NOW! And what happened to Ingrid!?"

"She's worse than you, but she'll live if that thing doesn't come in here and get us," said the person who was probing at Roff's bruised ribs. Roff squinted, and the fuzzy shape came into focus. Roff couldn't remember the man's name... and he couldn't see much of the man's face due to the bandages covering half of it.

"Are you-" Roff began.

"Roy. You're not a horse or a cow, but most of the basic stuff works the same. And I'm the closest thing to a healer we got right now. You'll be fine, I think. Are you dizzy? Blurred vision?"

"Yes!"

"Uhhh.... heh... I don't know what to do about that. I heard some other people askin, so I figured I'd ask too..." Roy shrugged. "I think they call it 'shock'. Maybe you need some water or something."

"I almost had more than my share," said Roff.

"Umm... I'll see what I can get. Probably nothing. Just rest here and don't go to sleep. Sleeping is bad if you're in shock. I think."

Now looking very sheepish and uncertain, Roy wandered away and lost himself in the increasingly nervous crowd. He'd left Roff sitting in a corner. Roff would have been content to stay there if the floor hadn't started shaking.

"Wh-What's that!" he squealed as the floor... and then the entire building... shook. The only reply he got was screams of panic from the crowd gathered around the windows, and moans of pain from the wounded on the tables, chairs, and floor all around him.

"They're fighting!" someone called.

"Who?" said Roff. He started making his way toward the window. One of his eyes was seeing clearly now... but the other was getting worse. The effect would have been dizzying even without the lump of pain pounding repeatedly beneath his skull. Roff closed his bad eye and tried not to step on anyone as he walked. "Who's fighting what? Are they winning?"

"I think they ARE!"

"Maybe we should help them!" said Roff.

A few members of the crowd... faces that Roff knew and recognized... turned and looked at him as if he had just taken off his clothes and was running around the room naked singing children's songs.

"He's sick," someone said.

"Go sit down, Roff," said another. "You'll feel better in a minute."

"But... but it's US that they're protecting!" Roff objected. "We should at least-"

The building shook again. From outside there came a sound as if the street were being torn open. Bottles of spices and flavoring fell off of the shelves lining the walls, and a couple of the moaning wounded toppled from their makeshift beds onto the floor.

"-uhhh, I'll go sit down," said Roff. "Yes... yes I think I'll do that..."

On his way to nowhere in particular, Roff stopped to help one of the wounded men. The zombies had taken the man's arm off at the elbow, but the stump had been stitched and bandaged. The man was still too weak to scream when he'd fallen. He just moaned deeply when Roff dragged him to his feet.

"Ohhhh, my back..." said Roff as he maneuvered the semi-limp patient toward the table he'd fallen from. "You, sir, are a very heavy man-"

There was a short buzzing sound and a sudden green flash. The injured man jerked in Roff's arms; his body stiffened so suddenly that he twisted out of Roff's grasp and dropped to the floor-

"YaH!" Roff yelped. "I think this man is having some sort of-"

And then Roff noticed the arrow protruding from the injured man's forehead. It was a bolt from a crossbow. Someone had put it through the exact center of the man's skull

"...uhhh..."

Roff looked around, trying to see who had fired the missile-

thww-UCK!

On the other side of the room, a patient sleeping peacefully on two chairs suddenly sat up-

-and fell dead with a shaft of wood piercing the side of his skull.

"HEY!" Roff shouted. He saw a flash of green to his left, and he spun-

thwwww-OCK!

Another patient jerked on his bed and lay still.

"SNIPER!!!" The shout came not from Roff, but from another of the patients. It was Frayger... a jovial old man with more grandchildren than anyone in Bephal. The old man's scrawny chest was wrapped in bandages, and his eyes were wide with fear. "UP THERE!" Frayger pointed to the cieling...

...but there was nothing there but wooden crossbeams and shadows.

But as soon as Roff tilted his head back to look, there was a quick flash of bright green light as something came through the wood and-

thwock!

Frayger yelped and pitched forward out of his chair. Old man was dead before he could even scream. The bolt had gone through his skull at a downward angle. Roff could almost trace the line from the green flash on the cieling to poor Frayger's corpse.

"Somoene's SHOOTING at us!" Roff shouted... finally getting the attention of the crowd that had previously been fixed on the events outside. People turned-

FLASH!
thwock!

Blood sprayed across Roff's arm. The man on the table to his right was now wearing a wooden shaft where his left eye used to be.

Now the screaming started.

"GET DOWN!" Roff ordered before throwing himself to the bloody floor. He saw another flash... and then another. He heard someone fall.

Another flash. Someone rolled off of a table and landed almost on top of him. Roff rolled over and looked up.

Yet another flash-

-and a woman's scream was cut short.

Who was doing this!? And how!? And WHY!?!

"It's killing the wounded!" Came a shout nearby. "It's killing the- URK!"

-thud.

"HE'S ON THE ROOF!" Roff tried to shout over the screams. Roff knew nothing about archery or magic... but he knew both when he saw them. The green flashes were where the assassin's missiles were phasing through the solid wood... which probably meant that the man firing them was on the rooftop. "OUTSIDE!"

Roff sprinted for the door.

"Are you CRAZY?! That THING is out there!"

"And WE'RE standing around in here like a bunch of cowards! Something's up there killing us... we have to stop it!"

Roff didn't wait to see who... if anyone... was following him. He snatched the door open and darted outside, immediately turning around and looking up at the rooftop.

The man standing there was looking down as if he could somehow see through the shingles below him. He was dressed in black, with a tattered cape hanging from his shoulders and a loaded crossbow aimed between his feet.

"NO!" Roff shouted. The man pulled the trigger. There was a flash of green...

...and a fresh round of screaming from inside.

"WHY!?!" Roff shouted up at the assassin. He had seen the man before... and he knew the man's name. But the last time Roff had seen Gallows, the man was trying to HELP them... even volunteering to die for them. Could this possibly be the same man that was now slaughtering people at random? "WHY!?!?"

Two more men came running out of the bakery. One of them was Roy, the helpless healer... Roff didn't know the other, but the man was carrying a rusty crossbow.

"GOT HIM!" The man fired. Gallows made a lazy gesture in the air, and the bolt... poorly aimed to begin with... veered to one side and sailed over the building. "Dammit, that was my last one!"

Gallows was staring down at them now... at Roy in particular, even though the veterinarian had not been the one that had fired on him.

"I think you made him mad!" Roy gulped. "At ME!"

Gallows turned and took two running steps toward the edge of the roof. His cape shot out behind him, catching some intangible breeze and carrying the assassin upward.

"Looks like we scared 'im off!" said the man with the now-useless crossbow.

"Scared?" Roy said as Gallows dipped into a smooth descent toward the roof of next building. "Doesn't look like he's scared to me."

"And it doesn't look like he's finished, either."

---

"But my DAUGHTER is out there!" Floyd D'Arcy protested as Sterl Herman pulled him away from the door. "She's out there!"

"Then she's either already dead or she's found a safe place to hide," said Sterl. "Either way, there's not much YOU can do to help her."

"But she's not right in the head, Sterl, you know that!"

"That's what you keep saying, Floyd, but she always seemed okay to me."

"Well you didn't look close enough! She's... delicate! And I have to go find her-"

"Nope."

"Let me out, I say!"

"Nope."

"I know your father, Sterl! Him and me go way back!"

"My father died out there earlier today. I don't think you wanna join him."

"But... ."

"When all the rumblin' and shakin' stops, we'll go hunt for whoever's left out there. I promise. Until then, nobody leaves... it just ain't safe. Now if I was you I'd stop concernin' myself wit what you can't do, and worry about what you can..." Sterl nodded at Casey, who was in a corner being tended to by some of the less hysterical women. From Casey had come a confusing but reasonably accurate account of the attack on his mother. Casey had been lucky enough to escape with nothing more than a slash to the arm and a serious but non-fatal bruise on his head. But, if Floyd's brief encounter with the woman was any indication, the attack had dealt a critical blow to Francesca D'Arcy's sanity.

"She... she's out there all alone," Floyd grumbled as the truth of Sterl's words set in.

"And he's in here," said Sterl, still looking at Casey. "All alone."

"Where's mommy!" Casey demanded when he saw his grandfather looking at him.

"She's fine," Floyd hurried over to the boy and inspected the bandage on Casey's arm. "...this looks tight-"

"I want mommy!" Casey waved his grandfather's hand away.

"Mommy's safe," said Floyd. He looked around. Half of the people in the room were staring expectantly at Casey, and the other half had attached themselves to the windows so they could see outside. Floyd's ancient knees popped as he crouched down in front of Casey. He placed one hand on the boy's shoulder and talked in a low, almost-whisper. "But if you want to help her, you know what you have to do."

"I can't!" Casey protested.

"You have to use the magic, boy-"

"I don't know howwww..." the boy whined.

"You don't have to know how. Just call Trisk. Get Trisk back here and he can help us."

"But he isn't heeere!"

"He can help your mother, Casey. He can find her and keep her safe. He can bring her back, and then he can fight the bad thing outside. You want that, don't you, Casey?"

"Uh-huh..." the boy nodded, but then lowered his face. "But I don't know howwwww. And I don't like it when he comes... I always wake up somewhere else and people are hurting me."

"I know, Casey, but you're a big boy now and sometimes big boys have to do things they don't want to do. They do them to help people. You want to help us, right? You want to help your mother?"

Casey nodded.

"Then call Trisk."

"I can't!" Casey stomped his foot and tried to turn away, but Floyd grabbed his grandson by the shoulders and held him.

"Now you listen to me, boy-"

Casey started to cry.

Floyd sighed.

"Could you at least try?"

"I tried already but nothing happened! He's..." Casey sniffed, but didn't finish his sentence.

"He's what?" said Floyd. "He's what, Casey?"

"...he's out there." Casey pointed to the door. Beyond it was the street. "He's out there and he's stuck!"

"Wha- what do you mean?"

"He yells at me, but he can't... "

"Can't what?"

"I dunno."

"So what is he saying to you?"

"He wants me to do something."

"Well!?!" Floyd's impatience was building. "What is it!?"

"He wants me to call him, but I don't know howww..."

"But you have to TRY, Casey!"

"I DID try, grampa! HONEST, I did! But I don't want the mean man to come back! He's mean and loud and he burns me! Burns me on the inside and it hurts! I don't want him, grampa, don't MAKE me!"

"Casey, remember what I said about being a big boy?"

Casey nodded.

"Well this is a real big-boy thing we need you to do now... one of the biggest things a big boy can do..." Floyd paused a moment to consider how ridiculous he just sounded.

"But I tried alreadyyyy..."

"And it didn't work, did it?"

"No."

"You know why?"

"No."

"Because you didn't really WANT it to work. You didn't, did you?"

Casey looked down at his own feet for a moment, and then shook his head.

"So that means you didn't try as hard as you could. You didn't, did you?"

"Nooo..."

"No what?"

"No sir."

"So what do you think you need to do now, Casey?"

"I dunno..."

"Yes, you do."

Casey dragged the tip of his foot across the floor, tracing an invisible circle around absolutely nothing.

"You want me to bring the mean man back," Casey mumbled.

"All I want you to do is try. But I want you to REALLY try this time. Try like a big boy. Can you do that?

After a long silence, Casey nodded.

"Then do it."

Casey sighed and looked around at the people staring at him.

"They're lookin' at me funny," Casey whined.

"They're looking because you're about to do something very important for them. But if they're bothering you, then just close your eyes."

Casey closed his eyes and held his breath. The muscles in the boy's face tightened... straining at some unseen task. Casey's skin began to turn red, and his shoulders trembled-

-then he exhaled and opened his eyes. The crowd leaned in expectantly-

"See, it didn't work!" said Casey.

"You didn't try hard enough-"

"But I DID!"

"Do it again," said Floyd.

"But-"

"Do it again, and I'll do it with you. Maybe we can do it together. You think that will work?"

Casey shrugged.

"Close your eyes. And I want you to breathe normal this time..."

"Yes sir." Casey closed his eyes and took a deep, exaggerated breath. Floyd's eyes remained open, but his hands tightened on the boy's shoulders.

"Are you trying?" said Floyd.

"Uh-huh..."

"Can you keep trying while you listen to me?"

"Uh-huh."

"Good. Now listen close... You saw the thing outside, didn't you? The bad thing in the ground?"

Casey nodded.

"You remember what it did the last time, don't you? You remember how it hurts people?"

Casey shuddered.

"You remember?"

"Uh-huh."

"Now where is your mother, Casey?"

"I dunno-"

"She's outside. She's outside with that thing... and nobody here can go look for her because it will get them. And if your mother stays out there... its going to get her, too."

"But you said-"

"I lied."

"But-" Casey's eyes flew open.

"Eyes CLOSED! Keep trying!"

"But MOMMY!"

"You can SAVE mommy if you keep trying!"

Casey closed his eyes.

"Think about the bad things you've seen. Those things are going to happen to mommy if you don't-"

"Floyd!" one of the women snapped. "You're scaring him!"

"I'm HELPING him is what I'm doing!" Floyd hissed. "Now shut up! Casey... mommy is in trouble. Mommy is going to be hurt really bad if you don't help her. And do you know how to help her?"

Casey was crying and trembling now.

"You have to get Trisk here. Trisk is the only one who can help us. Now you think about those bad things happening to mommy and you think about Trisk... all at the same time. You fit all that in your mind at the same time and then you BRING him here, okay?"

"...I'm trying..."

"Try harder!"

"...he's yelling at me really loud!"

"That means it isn't working... that means you have to try harder!"

"But-"

"Casey, your mother is going to DIE if you don't try!!"

"That's enough, Floyd," someone grabbed Floyd's arm. Floyd yanked away and shoved the person back.

"She's going to DIE!" Floyd shouted.

"Mommyyy!"

"Think about mommy and think about Trisk... all at the same time, Casey! All at the same time!"

Floyd didn't know exactly what he was expecting. Perhaps something was going to burst into flames when Trisk appeared... or perhaps the boy was going to levitate off of the ground.... or maybe someone in the crowd would slap him silly for torturing poor Casey with thoughts of his mother dying...

...but what he certainly didn't expect was for several people to turn toward the rear of the room... their attention drawn by a faint movement that Floyd himself almost didn't see. He would have certainly ignored it if the floorboard hadn't creaked loudly, drawing nearly everyone's eyes to the ominous black figure standing by the back door.

"Mr. Gallo-" Floyd began.

And then the world exploded.

---

With no more phantom arrows and a posse of would-be heroes on the way, Gallows had to do the second building the hard way... and quickly.

He had descended past the edge of the roof and landed behind the crowded shop. He paused to scan the wall. He couldn't see through it... but he didn't have to. With little more than a mental shrug, Gallows focused his empathy through the wood and into the room on the other side.

Dozens of emotions surged into the assassin's mind... in moments, each one was captured, separated, analyzed arranged by location. Gallows now knew the placement of every conscious mind in the room. With a little more focus, he knew the location of every UNconcious mind. From those he could derive the approximate layout of the room and the path he would take through it. Then, by pushing just a little bit further, he could perform the most important task: separating the Targets from the Inconsequentials.

By the time he reached the back door, Gallows knew which of the minds on the other side of it were about to be extinguished... and the exact order and manner of each death. He paused to consider a minor correction... but decided against it. He would save that task for later, when he could give it the additional attention it deserved.

With his original design unchanged, Gallows proceeded to the door, picked the ridiculous so-called 'lock', and slipped silently inside. The buzz of fear and pain was like a thick curtain hung across his path. Steeling himself against the stifling blanket of emotions... and against the onslaught that he was about to spark... Gallows stepped boldly into the room. His hands moved quickly before him as he-

Nobody saw him. Everyone was either looking out of the windows or clustered around Casey D'Arcy, leaving Gallows completely unnoticed... invisible in plain sight.

Gallows finished casting his spell, stepping forward as the magic contracted around his still-gesturing hands Someone finally noticed the exaggerated movements and turned toward him. There was a yelp of surprise, and then Gallows' foot came down an a loose floorboard. All eyes in the room shifted in his direction... someone even called his name... just as the spell reached its culmination.

A corona of yellow-white light expanded from the archer's fingertips, spraying outward in a brilliant disk that looked as if the sun itself had descended into the room and to hover gently above the assassin's outstretched hands. The disk's brightness suddenly increased tenfold, and the blinding flash unleashed a thundering BOOM that shook the walls and shattered every shard of glass in the building.

Gallows heard the screams in his mind first. Suddenly stricken both blind and deaf, the people in the room began shrieking frantically... simultaneously clutching at one another and pushing each other away as they either scattered in random directions or dove onto the floor for cover.

With the Inconsequentials nullified... except perhaps for the shrill roar of their terror scratching at his mind... Gallows proceeded to Phase Two.

He drew two knives from his belt as he advanced on the nearest table. The blades weren't exactly daggers... they were too long and slender... more like flattened spikes than a knives. But the points were as sharp as needles, and the narrow edges like thin razors. The man on the table was conscious... which meant that he was as blind and deaf as everyone else in the room except for Gallows. His clawed and bandaged body was too weak for panic, however, and he made almost no effort to defend himself as Gallows walked calmly past him-

-and plunged one of the slender spikes into the man's right temple, piercing the skull and sending a shaft of cold sharp steel through his brain. With a twist of his wrist, Gallows swept the blade in two brief arcs inside the man's skull, slicing the brain in half... and then quarters. The injured man jerked once. When Gallows yanked the implement free, a single spurt of fluid jetted from the hole as the corpse fell still. The patient's death was quick... neat... and efficient.

Gallows hadn't stopped walking during the entire two second execution. As the first blade was carving its fatal lines, Gallows had thrust the second into the skull of the adjacent patient... a woman who was clawing at her own useless eyes because she could not see what was happening. Not that it would have made any difference. He put her out of her frightened misery, then turned... stepped calmly over a dead body on the floor at his feet... and buried the first spike in a third target's cranium.

Gallows' cape fluttered behind him as he proceeded quickly down the row of injured, moving from the rear of the room toward the front. He did not stop at every table... and, in fact, did not stop at all. The assassin's hands were so quick that his feet never had to pause. He went from patient to patient in a calm but deliberate dance, dispatching each one with rhythmic precision. By the time he reached the front of the shop, he had touched thirteen Targets. He turned... took two steps... and started down the next row. Moving back toward the rear of the building, Gallows terminated the first two patients he came to simultaneously. There were seven more between him and the back door. Eyesight would be returning to the people in the room in about twelve seconds... by then, Gallows planned to be outside and proceeding to the next building. With all of the emotional disturbance in the shop, Gallows couldn't tell what was going on outside... but he could assume that Roff and the others would be reaching the front door shortly. They might catch a glimpse of him as he left, but that was all. Gallows passed the next patient... who was awake, on his feet, and flailing wildly with his bandaged arms, viciously slapping at everything around him. Because of the man's position, Gallows had to plunge his spike up through the jaw and into the cranium from below. It took an extra second to maneuver the blade into the vital areas in the rear of the brain, but Gallows made up for it on the next patient, whom he dispatched with a simple thrust through the base of the skull. In both cases the effect was the same: Almost instant death, with almost no pain.

But unlike others who practiced his particular trade, Gallows was intimately familiar with 'almost' in all of its ramifications. Even with a room full of fear clawing into his thoughts, each 'almost' painless, 'almost' instant death was a shrill siren blasting directly into his mind... but only for a moment. Gallows pulled both of his spikes free and moved on-

Suddenly he felt something.

Or rather... he felt something change. Something was different in the room. He felt the surge of anger even before his ears caught the high pitched wail from the front of the room. Gallows turned, already thrusting one of the spikes into his belt and drawing the mini-crossbow hanging next to it.

"What Are You DOING!?!" Casey D'Arcy screamed at him. Directly at him.... which was impossible, because the boy was supposed to be blind like the others. But two realizations hit Gallows as the small boy pointed an accusing finger at him. The first was that young Casey had his eyes tightly closed when Gallows had come in. And the SECOND was that the person speaking to him from the front of the room was NOT Casey D'Arcy. Not any more.

"Oh Hell..." Gallows mumbled. Knowing the exact length of time it would take for him to aim his bow and pull the trigger, Gallows opted for Plan B-

He dove to the floor just as the jet of flame erupted from the boy's finger. The thin bolt of fire expanded into a spear of angry red that exploded when it struck... blasting a man-sized hole in the wall behind Gallows and sending a shockwave of heat reflecting back into the room.

Gallows sprang from his hiding place and dove through the expanding wave of heat that was already igniting blankets, bandages, and tables in the immediate vicinity. The wall was now on fire, but Gallows threw himself through the new exit without touching the flaming wood. And instead of hitting the ground outside, he curved sharply upward... away from the second fireball that chased him out of the shop.

---

Without so much as a sideways glance at the people panicking semi-blindly around him, Jerimiah Trisk hurled himself up and out of their reach. The cieling above him exploded in a blast of flame and superheated air. Chunks of burning wood rained down on the hysterical crowd as Trisk soared skyward. He slowed and hovered over the shop, searching for the murderer... the coward was probably hiding behind the building, but Trisk's attention was diverted elsewhere...

December.

Yes... HE was the one behind this atrocity!

"YOU!" Casey D'Arcy's voice roared as he descended. December looked up at him with an expression of bored expectation, clearly unimpressed with the curls of flame sprouting from D'Arcy's outstretched fingers. "Your THUG is slaughtering my people!"

"And he was doing so under my direct orders," December said calmly. "'Your people' are infected, and history is about to repeat itself on a scale that even you cannot conceive..."

"MONSTER!" Trisk spat. Flames blossomed around him as he prepared to roast the murdering crime lord in hellfire. "You will-"

Trisk grabbed his head and screamed.

The flames and magic keeping him aloft above December suddenly vanished, and the boy dropped to the ground... howling in unison with the unholy shriek now emanating from below Bephal.

---

Hars was down.

Thane and Emerson were both on their knees, and Hemingway watched both men collapse as the awesome hurricane of sound tore at them with ever-increasing power.

Hemingway was the last to fall. He dropped to his hands and knees... retaining barely enough concentration to realize that he didn't HAVE any hands or knees, and that he could fall straight through the ground if he wanted to. But he didn't want to... because the sound was coming from there. The sound... the damned SOUND!

And that was exactly what it was: The Sound of the Damned. With the wicked scream of an old dead witch howling in one ear, and the abominable SHRIEK of a tortured man roaring in the other, Hemingway finally dropped. He felt the ground beneath him vanish... then re-appear... then vanish and re-appear again. His 'body' was flickering in and out, switching rapidly between the spiritual and physical planes. He felt like he was being pushed and pulled in a hundred different directions at the same time. Hemingway tried to find something to hold on to.... some physical object.... some thought or memory... but there was nothing there. The sound of the creature's death was like daggers of pure chaos driving into his skull.

Above him, the gray Bephal sky was literally boiling. The featureless cloud that had masked the sky since they're arrival was now tearing itself apart... heaving and roiling like a solid, living thing. Shafts of sunlight and glimpses of bright blue sky beamed through the widening cracks as the gray cloud tore itself to pieces above Bephal.

Meanwhile, just a few yards away, the wide chasm in the street had erupted in a spray of red. Blood... human blood... fountained up from the ground, covering everything in nearby in a red warm splatter. In the center of the gushing horror, the plant-creature's tentacles writhed... and screamed. They, like the sky above them, were dying with a speed and violence unmatched by any natural poison ever concocted. The thickest chunks simply exploded, spewing chunks of pulp and sap everywhere. The remaining stumps and the smaller tentacles dissolved where they were... leaving nothing but a greasy, bloody smear on the ground.

Hemingway saw it all, and he could not believe it. It was all too... too grotesque! Where was all that blood coming from? And the SCREAMING? And why wouldn't it STOP!? And... and.... and why was it getting CLOSER?!

"HELLP!" Hemingway couldn't even hear his own voice. He had no idea who he was calling to, or what he expected to happen. But with hell manifesting itself around him, screaming was all he could do. "HARS! EMERSON!" If there was an answer, he couldn't hear it. The ground shook beneath him... not a quake or a tremor... not a jolt... but an incredible explosion of pure violence that instantly demolished several buildings, and had several more literally dancing off of their foundations.

The blood fountain halted... and then something horrible began to claw its way out of the ground. Something huge. It looked like a massive seed that had gone to root... only the roots were alive: throbbing tentacles larger than any that Hemingway had seen so far. Pulsing like a human heart, the thing pulled itself into the open for the first and last time. Bright, pure sunlight fell across its gnarled surface, revealing just how monstrously grotesque the thing truly was. Monstrous... and doomed.

With each thundering beat of the disembodied seed/heart... larger and larger chunks of it peeled away, like pieces of an old, rotting corpse. The smaller pieces disintegrated to nothing before they had fallen more than a few feet. The larger ones splattered over the ground in a rain of sizzling sap that was the doomed creature's poisoned blood.

The sound of the damned creature's scream had now pummeled Hemingway into a shocked stupor. He could only watch as the massive heart's tempo tried to speed up and slow down at the same time... resulting in a twisting lurch that tore it further out of the ground while twisting it almost in half. The creature's once-thick skin had now been eaten away by the blood pouring down its surface. It was now a sickly brown membrane through which Hemingway could see sap boiling higher... and higher. The creature began to expand... and then contract... and then expand again as its remaining extremities finally went still.

The solid knife of sound that had been twisting in Hemingway's ears began to warble... and then rise toward a crescendo that would surely drive him insane before it was done. And if the sound didn't, then the sight...

Hemingway had seen enough. He closed his eyes, preferring darkness to the scene in front of him. But the sound was still there, and just as madness was upon him-

-he was somewhere else.

---

At first, December had no idea what was behind Trisk's paroxysms of pain, but when blood began gushing up onto the streets of Bephal, he knew that N'Doki had some hand in it. Only the necromancer could conjure such a grotesque spectacle... and if there was one thing that N'Doki truly loved, it was a spectacle. The bloodier, the better. Simply delivering the poison to the creature was not enough...

...bathing the creature and half of the town in blood, however, was perfect.

December could only shake his head and watch as the creature played its part to perfection... expending its final energies to haul itself out into the open so that it could die in full view of its enemies. December was neither disgusted nor fooled by the display. Even when the hulking mass exploded in a shower of sizzling wet chunks, and the boiling gray clouds peeled back to reveal the afternoon sky... and the blood splattered over the street slowly transformed back into water... December knew that it was not over.

In fact, it was just beginning. Again.

"...ohhhh, I'm stiff..." Emerson Shaw moaned. December regarded the Night's Bloom as they awakened around him. They all opened their eyes and assumed various facial expressions, but more useful movements were beyond them at their current temperature. "...and it's hard to move, too..."

December contracted the cone of nearly-freezing air that he had extended around them. They would warm up in their own time, but until then they would be vulnerable and useless.

And this was a particularly bad time to be either.

"Villain," Jerimiah Trisk huffed as he struggled to his... Casey D'Arcy's... feet. "You and your necromancer orchestrate our victory... but at the same time, you murder innoc-"

"Victory is far from assured," said December. He stepped away from the recovering Night's Bloom and approached Trisk. Behind them, the remaining buildings were beginning to disgorge their contents... the citizens of Bephal wandered cautiously out of their hiding places, casting uncertain glances at the mountain of gelatinous goo decomposing in their street. But the sky above them was clear and blue, and the warmth of the first unfiltered sunlight since the horror had began quickly burnt away their uneasiness. The slow trickle of people into the street became a flood... especially from the one building that was on fire from Trisk's rapid exit. The rapid evacuation of that and the surrounding structures soon had a crowd of people gathering around Trisk and December. There was mumbling... and talking... and crying and moaning... but no one dared interrupt the words flowing back and forth between the man who had ruled this town for over a generation and the man who had killed him. "This is not over."

"No it certainly isn't!" Trisk snapped. The air around him wavered as heat radiated from the boy's skin. Casey D'Arcy rose into the air... bringing his burning eyes level with December's cool gaze. "You still have to answer for YOUR-"

"I will answer for saving this town from another lifetime of monsters. The creature is not finished with Bephal. It has allowed itself to be destroyed to distract us from its true plans... its original plan. You, Trisk, have fallen for the same trick twice."

Trisk regarded him with angry suspicion.

"Even now, the same venom which corrupted us both works toward the destruction of this town. Hold me in as much contempt and suspicion as you wish, but you of all people know the consequences if what I say is true."

"And if you LIE? What THEN!?"

"Dozens are infected. You know what must be done, Jerimiah... for the safety of those who can still be saved."

"What's going on?" said Yexhill Thane. He and the Shaw brothers were on their feet now. Harrison Blackshear had returned to a body still wounded from battle, and was able to do little more than sit upright. Gallows was still missing.

"The bitter end of a long and painful fight," said December. "Not ours... but Bephal's. He now have the opportunity to end it all... or see it all begin again."

"I vote for ending it," said Thane.

"Fool!" said Trisk. "You have no idea what you are saying."

"I may be a half-frozen thug," said Thane. "but I can hear just fine. All that fighting we just did... that thing pulling itself out of the ground... going back in TIME!?! That was all for show, wasn't it? We've all been played for suckers, haven't we?"

"Indeed we have," said December. "The true climax of all our efforts is not behind us... it is occurring right now. It will be settled not with fists or swords or magic... but with one decision. A decision which I have already made."

"To kill innocent people!? HELPLESS people!?"

"The creature chose the weak and the wounded so that even if we discovered its ploy, we would not have the resolve to do what needed to be done. Had this happened days ago, the gambit would have been succeeded, and Bephal would be doomed. But now... now I know why I was brought here..."

"I won't allow it!"

"What's he saying!?" someone from the crowd shouted. "What's going on!?"

"This monster wants to KILL you!" Trisk shouted back. "He sent an assassin after the wounded!"

"It's true!" another voice shouted. The voice belonged to Grigory Roff, who stepped forward with two others and pointed an accusing finger at December. "We saw his man on the roof, shooting arrows at the injured! He killed a DOZEN OLD AND HELPLESS MEN! We SAW him!"

An angry murmur went through the crowd.

"Think about what you are doing, Jerimiah," said December. "You know what will happen if we fail."

"You have already failed, December. I will NOT allow you to kill innocent people!"

"They are no more innocent when you were thirty years ago, Trisk. They are tainted... just as you were. The innocence you seek to protect is gone. Soon there will be murderers and monsters roaming your city's streets. Bephal is a wounded place, and it will not survive this new infestation."

"This isn't right!" said Hemingway Shaw. "We can't just... we can't just KILL people-"

"Oh yes the hell we can!" said Thane. "Somewhere in that crowd are a dozen men just like Filkus! What do you think is gonna happen when they finally snap!? How many people are THEY gonna kill!?"

"Enough to destroy this town," said December. "And do not be so naive as to think they will stop here. Montfort is but a few hours travel, even on foot. Every traveler that comes near this place will be at risk. Once Bephal has fallen the evil will spread... as evil always does."

"And you will contain it with slaughter!?"

"Absolutely," December said, coldly.

"Maybe we can cure them!" said Hemingway. "Maybe there's a way-"

"And perhaps there is not. I am not willing to take that chance."

"But YOU beat it!" said Hemingway. "You and J'Hasp both!"

"Neither J'Hasp nor I are human. I doubt anyone here would have the same success."

"You doubt... but you don't KNOW!" said Roff. "You don't know for SURE that we can't cure them, do you?"

"Someone in Montfort can help," said Hemingway. "I'm sure of that!"

"Oh so we're gonna bring Filkus and friends to MONTFORT?" said Thane. "To 'play' with THEIR children!? Is that what you're saying, Shaw? Gods, I thought you were the SMART brother!"

"We could lock them up-"

"And if just ONE of those things gets out?"

"They aren't THINGS! They're people! And no one will be locked up or killed!" said Roff. "No one's done anything wrong! The law-"

"There is no law here, Mr. Roff. We are now in a unique position to do what must be done without the entanglements of law."

"That's all the law is to men like you... an 'entanglement'... something that stands in your way-"

"This is not about me," said December.

"It IS! It's about you picking people out of a crowd and killing them for no reason!"

"He will do no such thing," Trisk warned. "This, I promise."

"So THEN what?" said Thane. "You wait around until you start finding pieces of your children hanging from windows and lamp posts? How long will that be, eh? Months? Days?"

"Maybe its already happened," said a new voice... almost as cold and calm as December's. No one... except perhaps for December... knew how long Gallows had been hovering above the crowd. Now he drifted downward... descending like a black spectre hanging in the air behind December and above the Night's Bloom.

"THAT'S HIM!" Roff pointed needlessly at the hovering assassin. At the sight and sound of him, the crowd began to panic. Some of them knew full well what Gallows was capable of. Others could only guess.

"You're talking about this as if its all going to happen tomorrow... or next year..." said the assassin. "But its happening NOW. Some of them have already turned.... and some of them are standing right next to some of you. Right here in this crowd."

People in the crowd began to look around... trying their best to keep the suspicion off of their faces.

"He's turning you against each other!" said Trisk.

"Have you fools even done a head count?" Gallows continued. "Would you even be able to TELL when people start going missing? Who's watching what's left of your children? Anyone? Do you know where everyone is now... how many people have already wandered away unnoticed? I do."

"They're looking for survivors!" said Roff.

"All of them? Are you sure? Where is Francesca D'Arcy? And the old man, Floyd?"

Again, a flutter of movement went through the crowd as they turned to look.

"It's started," said Gallows. "People are already missing.... people you knew were alive and present a few minutes ago. The bodies will start turning up, soon. One of them already has.... the woman with the broken neck? Stuffed under a table in the infirmary? Which one of you put her there? Somebody in this crowd...? Or someone who's wandered off to hide and wait..."

"Don't listen to him!" Trisk roared.

"We have to stop this now," said December. "Here... and now."

"Yes, we DO!" Trisk's magic flared around him. Rings of fire began circling Casey D'Arcy's body as he rose higher. "You will not sow your evil here! Get out of my town!"

"Gladly," said December. "When your town is no longer a threat to mine."

"What's about to happen here?" said Harrison Blackshear, finally on his feet. "December, you can't possibly-"

"I can, and I do. The security of Montfort is at stake... not to mention the lives here that will be saved here. The stand must be made now."

"By killing wounded men and women!?" said Hemingway. "There's another way!"

"Name it quickly, Shaw."

"I- I- You're not giving me a chance!"

"A 'chance' is exactly what the creature wanted when it chose to infect the helpless. A 'chance' is what we must not give it... no matter the cost."

"ENOUGH! The people of Bephal are now under MY protection! LEAVE NOW!"

"Yes!" Roff added. "GO!"

The shout was repeated by several in the crowd.

"GO!"

"GO HOME!"

"This is your FINAL WARNING, December!" Casey's tiny hand drew back and a sphere of angry flame circled his clenched fist. Splashes of red hellfire dripped down the boy's arm as he raised it...

"Leave now and do not return!"

"Take your thugs and GO! You aren't wanted here!"

"GO! Go back to Montfort!"

"Send him away, TRISK!"

"SEND HIM AWAY!"

"Protect Us!"

The faint trace of malevolence in Trisk's stolen smile was unmistakable. December was not surprised to see it.

"And so the once and future lord of Bephal has returned to his throne," said December. "With an army of madmen to justify his rule for a long... long time."

"The only madman I see here is you!" Casey hissed through clenched teeth.

"KILL HIM!" came a cry from the crowd. At first, people were shocked that someone had dared to say it... but then-

"KILL HIM!" someone else repeated. The entire crowd did not take up the chant, but those that did were very loud. "KILL THEM ALL!"

"You've had your chance," said Trisk. "Now you will ALL pay for your master's treachery. So commands JERIMIAH TRISK!"

December was a mere twenty feet away, yet when the spear of flame leapt from Casey's fist... it never reached him...

...the attack exploded halfway to its target, spray jets of fire and sparks in all directions. The crowd gave a collective scream and backed away as the flames flew.... outlining a shape that had been standing invisible between Trisk and December the entire time.

The necromancer's form solidified... becoming impossible shadow, and then substance. Grinning with sharpened teeth even in his priestly disguise, N'Doki made a single, rapid gesture. A fist-shaped ball of darkness struck the floating Trisk just as a second ball of hellfire exploded across N'Doki's chest.

"ARRRRGH!"

Both mages went tumbling backward. Thane caught N'Doki by the arm. The crowd closed in around Trisk and helped the boy to his feet.

"'Tis good to see de true December once again," N'Doki said as he righted himself. His chest still smouldered from the blast. "It has been a long time indeed...."

"This town must be cleansed," December said with a look of ominous intensity. "Gallows... Emerson.... I have a task for you."

"Meee!?" Emerson squeaked.

"N'Doki, All my former restrictions on your methods... are now nullified. You are free to create whatever spectacle pleases you."

"Heh, heh, heh, heh..."

"What does THAT mean?" said Hemingway.

"...Heh, Heh, HEH!"

"I suggest the rest of you get as far away as possible. Bephal is about to become a very unpleasant place."

[To Be Continued]