"It all started three days ago,” said Resalintas. “When a group of young people entered the city from the east." The elderly priest then went on to tell of how Diana Winterwell, a young cleric of Caroli, accompanied by her two brothers and three young wizards, had entered the city, bringing the warning that a fourth Shadowwar was about to begin. He told of how they had managed to gain an audience with Colonel Vento, second in command in the city, and how they'd impressed him sufficiently that he'd come to him to ask his advice. He told of how he had tried to ask Samnos whether the warning was true, but had received no reply, and had therefore decided to resort to the more direct method of sending spies into the Shadow to see the situation for themselves.

     Drake stared in surprise. "You communed with Our Lord and received no reply?" he asked. That was almost unheard of, and usually meant that the priest was being punished for some offence. For it to happen to the great Resalintas... "What about the other priests, sir?"

     "They have all tried to commune with Our Lord, and none of them has received a reply, although He continues to reply to other questions. You are the only priest of our order in the city who has not tried. He favours you, so you may succeed where we have failed. I want you to try now."

     "Yes, sir," said Drake. He turned to face the three foot high bronze statue of Samnos standing in a niche in the wall, and dropped to one knee before it with his head bowed. He concentrated on the God to whom he had dedicated his life, filling his mind with all that he had been taught about the war deity. He envisaged a tall, powerful warrior, massively muscled and wearing sandals, a helmet and a flowing, crimson cape. The figure was carrying a large steel shield bearing the emblem of the golden griffin, and holding a long, bright sword notched and worn with frequent use. All around him lay the bodies of powerful, evil creatures, minions of Skorvos, the God of Conquest, and as he watched the picture in his mind's eye, another monster appeared and attacked. Samnos fended it off with his shield and felled it with a single swipe of his sword, chopping it almost in two, and it fell at his feet with all the others. He grieved over the creature's body for a moment, regretting the need to kill it, before raising his shield in time to meet the next one.

     Drake called out to Him, and he sensed that the God was giving him a portion of His attention. The room faded out around him and a new reality took its place, a vast parade ground, stretching to the horizon all around them. Drake and the God were standing a few feet apart and the young priest came to attention, saluting smartly. “Excuse me, My Lord,” he said, calling upon all his self control to keep his voice steady. “Request permission to ask a question,”

     “At ease, soldier,” said the God, a faint smile creasing his thin lips. “What do you want to know?”

     Drake was almost paralysed with awe and fear and it took him a moment or two to find his tongue. It occurred to him that the God was in all likelihood doing a thousand other things at the same time. He could be having dozens of other conversations with other priests, sending His power to help them overcome problems and challenges and sending dreams and visitations to non priests, as well as whatever duties and responsibilities demanded his attention in his own plane of existence. He was almost certainly in battle himself, fighting those minions of the forces of evil that were too powerful for any lesser being to deal with, and he could well be in conversation with other Gods and higher beings, giving them a far larger portion of his attention than he was currently giving to Drake. To receive any attention at all from this awesome being, though, however small, was almost overwhelmingly intimidating, and only someone who had undergone the gruelling and challenging training of a priest could stand up under it.

     Drake had had that training, though, and he stood tall and looked the God in the eye. “Forgive me for disturbing you, My Lord,” he said therefore. “We need to know whether there’s going to be another Shadowwar. We have received intelligence that leads us to believe that this may be the case, but we need confirmation.”

     “Then get it, soldier,” replied the God, turning away from him. The parade ground faded, and he was back in Resalintas’s private quarters. He whispered a few words of praise and got back to his feet, staggering a little as the effort of the communion took its toll on him.

     "Nothing," he said, in response to the Captain's enquiring gaze. "He granted me an audience but had nothing to say to me."

     Resalintas nodded. "Same as all the others," he said. "I thought at first that we had done something to anger Him, but now I think that He simply wants us to be a little less dependent on Him. We have fallen into the habit lately of turning to Him whenever we need information, instead of going to the bother of finding out for ourselves, and I think that He is telling us that this has to change. That is why I have decided to send a reconnaissance patrol into the Shadow to find out for ourselves if they plan another invasion, and since it is my idea, I must lead it."

     "Who else is going?" asked Drake.

     "Sergeant Gallit, if his commanding officer gives his permission, Corporal Rivan and half a dozen of his best men. There will also be a ranger with us, a man called Pars Darlon. He has lived his whole life along the fringes of the Shadow and knows the area like the back of his hand. He will be our guide on this mission. Twelve people in all."

     "Twelve?" said Drake in puzzlement. "Eleven, surely."

     Resalintas almost smiled. Almost but not quite. "Pars Darlon has a little pet, a grikon, and he gets a little annoyed if it isn't referred to as a person. Actually, it's very useful, and could be of great benefit to us."

     Drake nodded. He'd heard of grikons, and knew that the small flying reptiles, distantly related to dragons, were often kept by rangers and used to spy out the land around them. Wizards also sometimes used them as familiars. He wondered how strong its loyalty was, and how it would react to being taken into the Shadow.

     Come to that, he wondered what his own reaction would be as they approached the dreaded lands of the undead. Even these days, now that it was almost universally believed that the threat from the Shadowarmies had been ended for ever, the mere mention of the Shadow was often enough to make people go pale, shiver and make signs of protection.

     Drake thought back on what he’d been taught about the Shadow in his acolyte classes. It was an evil place, his tutor priest had told him, and almost impossibly ancient looking man who had been a formidable warrior in the days of his youth. Unlike other places that were evil because of the people or creatures that lived there, the Shadow had become inherently evil, and would remain so for centuries to come even if every living and unliving creature were removed from it. The very spirit of evil itself had entered the land centuries ago, soaking into the very soil, even the air itself. The way had been opened for it, it was believed, when the pitiful remnants of the once mighty Agglemonian Empire that had once occupied that land had been wiped out by that worst of all plagues, bloodeye fever. The sheer number of deaths, all occurring at once and in one place, the sheer quantity of human suffering, had probably been what had attracted the evil in the first place, and even today no-one knew it's name, or even if it had a name.

     "When do we leave?" he asked.

     “As soon as the ranger returns. There’s no telling when that’ll be, rangers don’t follow a fixed itinerary, but he generally returns to the city every month or so. If he’s not back in a week I’ll send him a farspoken message telling him to return. I'm sorry to be sending you out again so soon, but you've probably got a few days to relax and recover. You're relieved of all duties during that time."

     "Thank you, Sir." The younger priest paused for a moment as he gathered the courage to ask a question. "There's one other thing. You already knew everything that had happened to us during our patrol. You even knew when I'd be entering the city. You pinned it down closely enough to have a man waiting for me, as if you'd somehow been watching us. You could easily have concealed your knowledge from me, but you didn't, so I'm guessing you've decided to reveal how you came by this knowledge."

     Resalintas nodded. "And I'm guessing you've already got a pretty good idea."

     "You've got a scrying mirror," said the younger priest.

     Resalintas nodded and swept aside a velvet curtain that covered the far wall of the small room, revealing a hidden door. Opening it, he led the way into a larger room, with another door in the far wall. It was completely bare of furniture, but the walls were covered by several hundred weapons of all kinds. Knives, clubs, axes, staves, staffs, pole arms, ball and chains, lances, spears, arrows, crossbows. You name it, it was there. Plain ironwood weaponry, worn and splintered from a lifetime of frequent use, shiny steel ones straight from the armourer's forge, and elaborate ornamental ones. Purely ceremonial in nature and no good at all for actual combat but covered in beautiful artistic detail and decorated with jewels and precious metals. They came in every style and fashion imaginable, from the plain, utilitarian and functional style of Belthar to the carved wooden and feather decorated blowpipes of Nyundo and Agorro. Wickedly curved and beautifully ornamented Fu-Nangian weapons, lightweight shayen bows, feathery and delicate but amazingly strong and beautiful, and the heavy, chunky and utilitarian scimitars and hammers of the trogs.

     There were over twenty different kinds of sword alone, from small, eighteen inch infantry swords, little more than long daggers, to great two handed broadswords over five feet long with blades over five inches thick that only a giant of a man could lift, let alone wield. Thin foils, with ornate hemispherical wristguards hung side by side with curved scimitars and black bladed sabres, and rough looking common swords hung alongside expensive ceremonial swords with basilisk leather pommels and cursive patterns of platinum thread along the blades.

     "My one vice," said Resalintas as Drake stared around in wonder. "I like to collect weapons. Come on, this is what you want to see." He led the way to the one area of wall not covered with weapons, a five foot wide area where a mirror of polished silver hung. "This is how I was able to follow your progress, from the moment you left the city to the moment you returned. Did you ever get the feeling you were being watched?"

     "No," said Drake. "Should I have?"

     "Not necessarily. Some people with exceptional sensitivity can tell when they're being watched in a mirror like this, or by some other scrying device. There are even ways whereby powerful wizards and priests can tell who is watching them and hit back at them."

     A thought struck Drake. "Why can't you use this mirror to spy on the Shadowarmies? Obviously you can't, or you would have done so, but why can't you?"

     Resalintas nodded. "I have tried, but scrying devices cannot penetrate the Shadow. This has been known since the first Shadowwar, but I tried anyway. I, and others, have tried several other ways of gathering information from afar, but none have worked. Spies are the only answer."

     The conversation flagged, and Drake found himself gazing around at the Captain's weapon collection again. He had never thought of the iron hard elder priest as having a hobby, and could hardly believe it. This was a side of the Captain he'd never suspected, that he'd not even thought possible. Ever since meeting him for the first time as a young child all those years before, he'd had the same picture of him as everyone else, a merciless disciplinarian whose one purpose in life was to make things as miserable as possible for everyone around him. Now, though, he began to see him as a person in his own right, with interests and hobbies outside his work just like everyone else. He tried to imagine the elderly priest lovingly polishing and sharpening a particularly well liked piece, perhaps a weapon he had taken from a defeated enemy, until it had been restored better than new, then hanging it in a vacant spot on the wall and standing back to admire it. It occurred to him suddenly that he must have had a childhood, and tried to imagine him as a young boy, but that was just too much. There were limits, after all.

     “You like my collection?” asked Resalintas, obviously pleased. All collectors like their collections to be admired.

     “It's astounding,” said Drake truthfully. It had occurred to him to pretend to admire the collection, as a way of getting into the Captain's good books, but found that he was genuinely impressed by it. Later, he was immensely grateful for this, realising that Resalintas would have seen through the deception at once.

     "What's this?" he asked, indicating a curious looking contraption consisting of a long pole, about eight feet long, down which a length of rope ran with a wide noose at the end. It also had various leather ties and metal loops along it, to guide the rope, and a knob around which it could be tied.

     "A mancatcher, from Kenestra," said Resalintas. "The loop goes around the victim's neck, and he can then be held at arm's length by the pole. They're used by their city guards to catch troublemakers without harming them."

     He hesitated, torn by the need to maintain an air of authority over his subordinate and a strong desire to show off the cream of his collection to someone who would really appreciate it, something that ran the risk of creating a feeling of familiarity between them that would be disastrous for discipline.

     But then, Drake was a priest, like himself, personally chosen by Samnos to serve Him, and that should mean that he was professional enough to understand the importance of discipline and not take advantage of a less formal relationship. Their God, after all, was very particular in whom He chose, and would not choose anyone lacking the necessary self control and discipline. If he did take advantage, he would just have to come down hard on him and slap him back into place, that's all, but he would be surprised and disappointed if that became necessary. He decided to allow himself the luxury of opening up a little, therefore, and yielding to his strong desire to show off his collection.