“You were hard on him,” said Malefactos, using telepathy since, as a maggot, he had no voice. “He was right, I gave him no choice, and I planned to release him soon anyway.”
Algol stared at him in disgust. “Mercy from a rak?” he sneered. “Of course, thou art but newly transformed, and thou hast still some residual human qualities. These shall surely pass in time, but until they do be sure thou keepest them under control. There is no place for mercy in the Shadowarmies.”
The older rak then began to walk back towards the centre of Arnor, dropping the maggot into a pouch on his belt, but Malefactos was exultant at the success of his mental mask. Fooled you, Algol! he thought, being careful to shield his thoughts from him. You’re not quite as infallible as you think, are you? He sobered quickly, though, as a new thought struck him. No, and neither am I. Who would ever have thought that I, Malefactos, would find myself in a predicament like this?
Despair hovered close around him, just barely held at bay as he tried to tell himself that everything was going exactly to plan. To distract himself from these gloomy thoughts, he looked out through the spectral material of Algol’s leather pouch at the city around him, using his rak vision since, as a maggot, he had no eyes. They soon left behind the still largely ruinous outskirts of the city and entered the built up inner regions of the Necropolis in which virtually every building had been restored almost to its original condition, after a fashion. There were differences, though, and an inhabitant of the city from before the fall of Agglemon, somehow transported into the city as it was now, would have been shocked to the very core of his being at what he saw. The function and purpose which every building had served was instantly recognisable, and Malefactos saw opera houses, theatres, art galleries, shops and restaurants lining both sides of the wide avenue they were following; an avenue that had a wide strip of what had once been tree lined gardens along its centre.
Each and every building had been subtly altered making them things of horror and revulsion. It was nothing you could put your finger on, but there was definitely something, and it was more than just the bleached white humanoid bones that covered everything or the obscene and disgusting ‘decorations’ that some of the more imaginative of the undead had added. Perhaps it’s just the Shadow, thought the young rak as he tried to puzzle it out. Maybe the Shadow affects our perception of things, making them look worse than they really are. If it can have that kind of affect of me, though, a rak, then it must be really powerful here. Really powerful indeed.
Much worse then that, though, were the shades. Wandering the streets, sitting on park benches, going in and out of houses and buildings were the faint but clearly visible images of the people who had once lived here, centuries ago, before the fall. They weren’t ghosts, spectres, wraiths or any other of the various kinds of spiritual undead who possessed the memories and personalities of the people they’d once been. They were shades. Mere images without minds or consciousness, absorbed by the rocks, the walls, the ground, even the air itself and now released by the power of the Shadow. Memories of a lifestyle and a society that had vanished three hundred years before.
Malefactos watched in fascination as he saw Agglemonian noblemen strolling in total confidence and security along the paved walkways, discussing weighty matters with other noblemen or with high ranking military men in splendidly elaborate uniforms. White robed senators with shaved heads and large, heavy looking rings of office on their fingers. Tall, self important wizards whose defensive spells were deliberately made visible as status symbols, forming a shimmering in the air around them. Modest looking, sandal footed clerics who refused to allow the richness of the society in which they lived to change their simple way of life. Nannies pushed babies in prams or herded small children like sheep. Older children played in parks, running, laughing and shouting happily, and smartly dressed, immaculately clean street traders sold fruit, vegetables and hand made goods from beautifully painted and polished barrows and carts, occasionally stopping to show their permits to a passing patrolman armed only with a short baton. It was, at first sight, a peaceful, tranquil scene, contrasting vividly with the awful reality of the Necropolis, and the young rak marveled that the idyllic scenes were permitted here. Perhaps they can’t help it, he thought. Perhaps it’s an unavoidable side effect of the Shadow.
Moments later, though, they passed close by the transparent, insubstantial images of a pair of middle aged noblewomen dressed in huge, billowing dresses and cruising slowly down the street as magnificently as a pair of tall ships in full sail, and as Malefactos got his first good look at their faces he felt an icy chill shooting down his maggoty spine. Although the postures and behaviour of the two women appeared normal and natural, giving no indication that there was anything at all wrong with them, their faces were twisted into expressions of purest terror and their mouths gaped wide open to their fullest extent in endless, silent screams.
He took a second, more careful look at the other shades around him, and now that he knew what to look for he saw that they were all screaming, even the biggest, toughest looking patrolmen. The street traders were screaming as they offered their wares to the passers by. The children were screaming as they kicked a leather ball against a wall. The nannies were screaming as they pushed their prams, and the young rak knew that, if he were close enough to be able to see into them, he’d see that even the babies were screaming, their pudgy, rosy cheeked faces screwed up in terror until they looked like something out of a madman’s worst nightmare. Everyone was screaming, as if being in the Shadow was a torment too great to bear, and Malefactos imagined all the screams from all the shades in the city blending together until they became a single scream, endless and terrible, just above the range of human hearing.
Malefactos was now glad he was no longer wearing the Crown of Auros, because he knew, knew without the slightest shadow of a doubt, that if he’d been wearing it now, he’d have been able to hear that scream and, hearing it, he would have gone mad...
He shook himself angrily. Get a grip on yourself! he told himself. They’re only shades, they’re completely harmless. They’re just images, shadows from the past, similar in many ways to the Ghost Ocean except that they’ve been distorted by the Shadow, like everything else in this hellish place. It’s grotesque, horrible, macabre, but that’s all it is. Now don’t be stupid! What are you, a rak or a baby?
Even so, though, he found himself unwilling to look at the shades and tried to look only at the reality of the Necropolis; the buildings with their strange, vaguely disturbing architecture and the thousands and thousands of undead of all kinds that inhabited the central regions of the city. Most of them were of the commonest, most familiar kinds. Skeletons, zombies, the occasional cropazombie. Ghosts, spectres, wraiths, wights and bogles. Here and there, though, he saw creatures he’d only heard of in whispered fireside tales, creatures whose very existence he’d doubted for lack of reliable evidence. A man shaped silhouette of perfect blackness lurking in a doorway could only be a nacrosium, and a pair of glowing crimson eyes floating about five feet above the ground, surrounded by long, flowing wisps and streamers of yellow and gold luminescence, had to be nothing less than a halluci, a creature whose unparalleled ability to create illusions made it almost as dangerous as a rak.
It was several hours, however, before he realised that there was one kind of undead creature missing, one kind of undead creature of which he hadn’t seen a single specimen since entering the Shadow. This puzzled him so much that he was eventually driven to asking Algol, and he raised his mental mask again in case he provoked another mental scrutiny. “Mighty Algol,” he said therefore, trying to sound cowed and dismayed at how little effort this required. “Could you please tell me, where are all the vampires?”
“Vampires are no longer permitted in Arnor,” replied the older rak. “The order was given a sixday past that all the vampires in the Shadowarmy be destroyed immediately. By now few indeed are left, and soon there shall no longer be any left anywhere in the world. The breed shall become extinct.”
Malefactos was stunned. “But why?’ he asked. “Vampires are among the Shadowlord’s most powerful and useful servants.”
“No longer,” replied Algol. “Their usefulness hath come to an end.”
“But why?” repeated the younger rak. “I don’t understand.”
“That should be obvious,” said Algol impatiently, speaking as if to a particularly stupid underling. “All vampires do have a weakness that doth make it impossible for them to exist in a completely undead world.”
Understanding came in a flash, and Malefactos cursed himself for a fool for not having seen it immediately. “Vampires need to feed on the blood of the living,” he said. “So if all life were wiped out, they would starve.”
The idea of a starving vampire was so horrible that even the rak, who’d seen and done terrible things in his time, was forced to shudder. A vampire couldn't starve to death, because they weren’t alive, but the hungrier they got the weaker they became until they no longer had the strength to leave their coffins. Unable to hunt for fresh blood, they could only lie there getting hungrier and weaker until their suffering became too great to imagine, and it never ended. It went on for ever and ever, getting worse all the time. Vampires faced with this fate usually chose to destroy themselves by lying out in the sun, but if the whole world was covered in Shadow they wouldn't be able to do even that. Malefactos saw now that Algol was right. Destroying them all now was an act of mercy.
What? he suddenly thought, however. Mercy from a rak? No, Algol was right. Mercy was a quality that old and established raks simply didn’t possess, a quality that he himself would lose in time, so if they were destroying all the vampires they must have another motive. It wasn’t hard to figure out what it was. Faced with racial extinction, the vampires would turn against the Shadowarmies and do everything in their power to defeat them.
“What I still don’t understand, though,” continued the younger rak, “is why they’ve been willing to help you until now. Surely their eventual fate was clear all along.”
Algol smiled evilly. “Some were weak enough that we could compel them to help us whether they did want to or not, as we can the lesser undead. Those that were strong enough to resist the power of the Shadowlord we did lie to, telling them we did intend merely to enslave the life of this world, not destroy it. The life of this world would belong to them, we said, as a farmer doth own his flock.”
“But a little while ago they figured out the truth,” said Malefactos flatly.
“Aye, with a little help,” agreed Algol. “One of them was captured by a priest of Samnos, who did explain the situation to him and then did release him to spread the word.”
“Released him?” said Malefactos in astonishment. “A priest of Samnos released a vampire?”
“This is no ordinary priest,” replied the older rak, his eyes clouding over in thought. “This is a priest who has troubled us before, and who could be more trouble in the future. Something shall have to be done about him. Aye.”