Half an hour later, they were ready to leave.

     The fifteen raks filed out into one of the fortress monastery's open courtyards where a small crowd had gathered to see them off. Abbot Captain Mase was there, along with a delegation of younger priests, acolytes and postulants, and beside them stood Elmias and his team of still living wizards. Above them, a comet and the largest moon drowned out the light of all but the brightest stars, and a few shooting stars streaked across the sky, some of them large enough to create audible rolls of thunder as they exploded miles above the ground. The assembled wizards and priests ignored the spectacle, though. This moment was the culmination of fifteen great lives and would hopefully lead to the salvation of the planet.

     “As soon as the sun sets you must destroy our arks,” Resalintas told Mase. “If we haven't accomplished our mission by then, we shall have failed. We will either have been captured or destroyed by the enemy or turned to evil. Either way, our existence will have to be ended.”

     “It shall be done,” agreed the other priest. “Sunset today.”

     Tragius spoke to Elmias. “If we succeed in destroying the Shadow, I’ll send you a Farspoken message to teleport in straight away. I’ll cast a beacon spell to guide you in.”

     Elmias nodded. He was pale with fear, but showing greater courage than Tragius had ever given him credit for. He won’t let us down, the undead wizard thought. I’ve done him a great injustice these many years, both in word and thought, but if we succeed the whole world will know him for the hero he really is.

     He held out his hand to the living wizard, then cursed himself for a fool and snatched it back while Elmias laughed nervously. He still couldn’t get used to the idea that he was now an undead being and that his touch could now kill.

     “Be careful,” said Elmias, forcing himself to look back at the hideous, mummified face with its burning, shining eyes and reminding himself that this was still a trusted friend of his. “Don’t take any stupid risks.”

     “And you,” the rak replied. “Hopefully we’ll meet again very soon.”

     “I’ll be there,” promised the wizard. “When I get your call, I’ll come.”

     Tragius nodded, and he stepped back to rejoin the other raks. The good raks. The white raks, thought Elmias with a smile. White raks, even though their stretched and shrunken skins were now the colour of old shoeleather. He remembered that some of the raks had had dark brown skin. Indeed, one of the priests had been a glossy blue black. Now, though, there was no way to pick them out from the others.

     Resalintas placed his helmet once more upon his head, as did the other priest raks, reminding the courtyard’s living occupants that they were still priests of Samnos, even though they were now undead. He looked up into the sky, where a few wisps of high altitude cirrus were beginning to glow pink. Dawn was not far away. “Time to go,” he said. “Is everyone ready?” Everyone was, so they spoke the words of the teleportation spell and vanished.

     They re-appeared in the middle of a vast prairie that stretched all the way to the horizon all around them. “The Tannaric Plains,” said Alustra, looking around in wonder. “Look, you can see the Blue Mountains on the horizon. We can't be far from the University.” She looked in the other direction. “And somewhere over there is the Southern Sea.”

     “With several small city states in between,” added Kharsh. “Why did they never come together to form a kingdom, like in most of the human world?”

     “Malefactos came close to uniting them,” the enchantress replied. “This is where he came to carve out his empire. He conquered five cities before age put an end to his ambitions.” She looked to the east. “Darundra is in that direction, I believe. About a hundred miles away. That's where he started. We must be right in the heart of his little embryonic nation.”

     “Is it still a nation, or did all the cities become independent again when he left?” asked Kharsh.

     “I don't think anyone ever bothered to keep an eye on them. This is a backwater, far from any great power. It'll probably be the last place the Shadowarmies conquer if they're victorious.”

     “Rather a curious coincidence that we’re having to pass through territory once claimed by him in order to take advantage of the enemy's weakness that he discovered,” said Vasta. “It gives one the comforting sense that everything we are doing has been planned in advance by some greater power.”

     “It may have been,” replied Resalintas, “ but that is no guarantee of victory. Already, time grows short.”

     The others nodded soberly. Their teleportation had carried them almost a thousand miles eastward, as well as two thousand miles south, and the yellow sun, still below the horizon at Crystalwade, was already in the sky here. They had until the sun set to complete their mission. The yellow sun had to be in the sky when they blew the hole in the Shadow, so that sunlight would shine through and kill the Shadowbeast. If the sun had set, their efforts would be wasted.

     Resalintas looked around at the vast emptiness and seemed to register disappointment, as if he’d expected something or someone to be there who wasn’t. Aerethil, meanwhile, was still staring around at the empty grasslands, but this time in confusion. “Where’s the city?” she asked, raising a clawlike hand to brush away some of the few remaining straggly grey hairs that kept falling across her face, as if in mockery of the way her once rich and luxuriant dark hair had behaved in the days of her youth. Although she was now a rak, and as gaunt and hideous as the rest of them, a few hints and reminders of her once legendary beauty could still be seen here and there on what remained of her body, and anyone who saw her, even without knowing who or what she had once been, would have been able to guess that this creature was female.

     “Is this the right place?” added Adantus.

     “It is,” replied Resalintas. He took a few paces forward, bent down and parted the tall grass with his hands to reveal the ruined remains of a wall. The grass withered and died at his touch, and patches of dead grass were appearing around the other raks as well, revealing other bits and pieces of rubble. The remains of a large building.

     “It’s been flattened!” exclaimed Durmatil, one of the other wizard raks. “Completely razed to the ground!”

     “That’s what five hundred years of storm, wind and rain does to a city,” said Tragius, stepping up to examine the wall Resalintas had uncovered. “Most surviving Agglemonian ruins are in forests or mountains, but here the full force of the elements is free to sweep across the grasslands. The people of Tannar speak of storms so furious that all wooden structures are reduced to matchsticks and whole herds of bison can be carried for miles through the air. Every farm has at least one large building made of quarried stone into which they drive their herds when they see a storm coming...”

     “We’re not here for a geography field trip!” snapped Resalintas irritably. “Let’s find the opening to the teleportation chamber. Spread out and search.”

     Some of the wizard raks took to the air to search a greater area, and a few minutes later they found it. A great slab of stone three feet thick and ten feet on a side had been laid out on the ground, left there by a Beltharan wizard after the return of Thomas Gown and his friends to prevent any of the local farmers or nomads from wandering around the teleportation network. There were plenty of signs that the place had been visited. Large areas of the waist high grass had been flattened by farmers driving their herds in search of water, and the stone had been used as the base of a camp fire. Some chips and marks around the sides of the stone testified that someone had tried to move it, perhaps suspecting that there was treasure beneath, but a single wave of Tragius’s wand of disintegration accomplished what they had failed to do and revealed a stairway, still partially blocked by rubble, leading down into the darkness.

     Resalintas looked around at the surrounding grasslands again, and if his shrunken, mummified face had still been capable of registering emotion, Tragius was sure it would have been showing concern and disappointment. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Were you expecting to find someone here?”

     “He’s looking for me,” said a new voice, and they spun around to see that they had somehow become surrounded by a group of tall, gaunt figures dressed in long, dark robes and gowns.

     “Vampires!” cried Adantus in alarm. He raised his mummified, clawlike hands to cast a spell, but Resalintas grabbed his arm, stopping him.

     “Peace,” he said, spreading his arms to include all the white raks. “These people are here at my invitation. They are to accompany us on our mission.”

     “Accompany us?” said Kharsh in confusion. “Vampires?” Of all the white raks, he was the one who’d benefited the most from the transformation. As a living man he’d been a cripple, confined to a wheelchair and barely able to move on his own, but now he was walking around as freely as the rest of them.

     “Yes,” replied Resalintas. “We're going to need all the help we can get in Arnor, and the vampires have as much reason to hate the Shadowhosts as we do. The Shadowlord plans to turn Tharia into an undead world, but without a constant supply of fresh blood the vampires will starve.”

     “A good parasite keeps its host alive,” agreed Allissa, another of the wizard raks. Back in the University she’d specialised in the study of living creatures, with special interest in the more exotic forms of life that sucked life nourishment from living victims. She nodded perfectly happy, under the circumstances, to accept the company of vampires.

     “I see you no longer need my help to become undead,” said Kar-Noth, stepping forward and grinning, baring his long, needlelike teeth. Tragius detected a definite trace of disappointment in his voice.

     “My original plan worked out,” replied Resalintas. “I’m still glad to see you, though. I was a little worried when we arrived and you weren’t here.”

     “Just being cautious,” said the vampire mage. “As you can see, I managed to persuade some of my brethren to come. The case you made for our cooperation was compelling.”

     “Only twenty,” said the priest rak, counting the vampires. “I’d hoped for more.”

     “Selfishness and distrust are the hallmarks of the vampire,” said Kar-Noth with a shrug of his shoulders. “However, I have come in the company of others who, I am sure, will more than make up for their absence.”

     “What others?” asked Resalintas.

     He was answered a moment later as two more groups of tall, robed figures became visible, the spells that had rendered them undetectable being allowed to fade. The evil that flowed outwards from the new arrivals was so potent, so intense, that even the priest raks were forced to flinch back a step, their hands flying instinctively to their golden griffin badges. Samnos give us strength! prayed Resalintas as he recognised the creatures who were to be their new allies.

     They were, without doubt, among the most powerfully evil creatures in the world, creatures so malignant and terrible that not even the desperate world situation had tempted Resalintas into asking their aid, but now it seemed that his uncharacteristic caution had been futile. The new arrivals were to be their allies whether they wanted it or not.

     “Gl hugzi!” gasped Renda as he too recognised one of the newly arrived groups.

     Resalintas nodded in reply. The fell men, living in their dark, subterranean cities a mile below the surface of Tharia, had wizards and priests of their own who were as capable of rak transformation as humans. The gl hugzi were fell man raks, creatures more terrible than most humans were capable of imagining, and the grass around their feet did not simply wither and die, as it did around the human raks. It was puffed instantly into a fine grey powder, centuries of decay and decomposition compressed into a fraction of a second, and as they moved forward they left a trail of dust behind them. A trail of death and emptiness cutting vividly through the verdant green grassland. It was said that the aura of death that surrounded them was so powerful that any living man who caught even a glimpse of one would instantly drop dead as if shot through the heart with a poisoned arrow.

     Evil and terrible though these creatures were, though, even they were keeping a wary eye on the second group, and Tragius was sure he detected more than a trace of fear in the undead fell men. What are they? he wondered nervously. What kind of creature is so terrible that even the gl hugzi are afraid of them?

     He knew, of course. Of all the creatures that infested the sad, tortured globe of Tharia, there was only one possible candidate, and he found that even his shrunken, undead body was shivering with fear to be so close to them. They also wore long, dark robes, but the shapes beneath them were different, wrong. The shapes of creatures that were as far from humanity as the dark, swampy globe from which they came.