Without speaking, we walked to the very heart of the village, coming to a circular patch of mud with a shallow flame-pit dug in the middle. Unfamiliar runes had been carved in the stones that lined the pit; I suspected they were invocations to whatever god the umbrals deemed it necessary to mollify.

Wheezle nudged Yasmin and she held him aloft, her hands under his arm-pits like a mother lifting her child. «Honored fiends,» he called, «we have come to negotiate trade.»

The crowd of shadows uttered no words, but they rustled like poplar leaves stirred by a stiff wind. Every shade-dark face crinkled into a razor-toothed smile.

The swamps of Othrys have no cycle of morning and night. The sky is always somber and overcast, the air pregnant with the anticipation of a storm that never comes. Sages claim that the red-tinted light of Carceri comes from the land itself; but in the fetid umbral swamps it leaked up to the sky, then reflected down again from the clouds, casting a cold illumination whose chill gradually seeped into our bones.

Wheezle told us the negotiations to sell the soul-gems would take three days – not more, not less. I wondered what a day meant in a place without light or dark; but Kiripao told me the umbrals measured out time in chunks of twenty-four hours, just like so much of the multiverse… an enigma that has puzzled more learned brains than mine.

As promised, the fiends supplied us with all the necessities of life, even before Wheezle and Kiripao began discussions with the village council. Umbral food consisted of marsh weeds and beetles, which the others refused to eat until I assured them the insects had an appealing nutty flavor… rather like a cross between grasshoppers and earthworms, although the worm taste probably came from the mud clinging to each beetle carapace. (Haven't you found that no matter how thoroughly you wash a bug, you can never clean away the grit that lodges in the crannies of its exo-skeleton? Then again, my dwarven friends say the dirt is the best part.)

The water offered by the fiends had a greasy aftertaste, but it was drawn from a well, not the river. I had heard stories about water from the River Styx – how the tiniest dribble touching tongue or skin could erase your memories, leaving you empty as an infant – and I worried that some portion of the Styx might have seeped into the well. However, after steeling myself to try a sip, I suffered no ill effects… so I used every drop in the bucket to wash off the sticky white dust still coating my body. The others did the same with their own buckets, and Yasmin went so far as to begin a tiny invocation to test whether the dust was safely gone. A second later, she broke out in a fit of coughing, pressing her fists to her chest.

«What's wrong?» I asked, wrapping my arms around her.

Wheezing, she gasped out, «Lungs… my lungs!»

As I held her, waiting for her to recover, I contemplated how much dust we must have inhaled during our fight with the Fox. How much lurked in our noses, our throats, our bronchial tubes and deeper? I couldn't say; but none of us would be casting magic for a long, long time.

The umbrals gave us a single hut for lodging, with a floor three paces square… not much space for five human-sized people and a gnome. On the other hand, we weren't all going to sleep at the same time; even with the fiends on their best behavior, we scheduled a watch around the clock.

To prevent the enemy from catching any of us alone, we decided to pair off. Wheezle and Kiripao, our two most knowledgeable bloods when it came to umbrals, would handle negotiations. Miriam volunteered to accompany Hezekiah wherever he went, leaving Yasmin and me together… which caused us a nervous blush or two, but we didn't ask for a different arrangement.

The four of us who weren't negotiating took on the task of learning if this village had a portal, where the portal went, and what key was needed to open it. Accordingly, Yasmin and I took a stroll around the area, keeping our eyes peeled for the faint glimmer of a gate. Soon, however, I found my attention straying to something totally unexpected: umbral art. The huts weren't the only things molded from solid darkness; everywhere you looked there was brooding black statuary, sculpted from pure shadow. A few had recognizable subjects – a fat human man laughing wildly, a woman being crushed under a stone – but most were utterly alien shapes. What was I to make of a pitted block that resembled a human knucklebone, or something like a huge axe-head attached to a shriveled cone?

As I was looking at this last one, an umbral slithered up beside me and murmured, «You like ssstatue?»

«Is it supposed to be a tomahawk?» I asked.

«Isss abssstract,» the umbral replied, sounding as if I'd offended him. «Isss ssstatement.»

«What kind of statement?»

«Come now, Britlin,» Yasmin said beside me. «It shows the precarious balance of all our lives… how we cling fanatically to familiar concepts, while deep in our hearts we doubt if we've made the right choice.»

«Yessss, yesssssss!» the umbral whistled. «Issss exactly that.» He sidled closer to Yasmin. «You are artissst?»

«No, I just know what I like.» She reached out to tap on the axe-like statue, but her finger went right through. It seemed the shadow-stuff wasn't so solid after all. «Were you the one who made this?» Yasmin asked.

«Made it, yesss,» the umbral replied. «Jusssst a humble effort.»

«It's very good,» Yasmin said. «It has a particularly strong sense of form and motion.»

«There's no motion,» I muttered, «it's a sodding statue. The piking thing just sits there, doesn't it?» In a louder voice, I asked the fiend, «Have you considered making a piece that actually looks like something? Perhaps you could get a pretty she-umbral to model for you. Nothing develops your attention to accuracy as much as sculpting from the figure…»

But that was as far as I got. The fiend covered its ears with its hands and ran shrieking into the marsh.

Yasmin patted me on the shoulder. «I don't think they're ready for these advanced artistic concepts.»

«Primitives,» I growled. «I can't understand why their work gets so much attention.»

And for several minutes thereafter, I found myself kicking at any pebble with the audacity to lie in my path.

Our walk through the village and outlying regions took several hours, after which I arbitrarily declared that night was drawing in. Of course, there was no change in the uniform grayness of the Carceri sky; but fatigue was pressing down on me, compounded by the many exertions of the day. Yasmin agreed it must be dark by now, back in Sigil… and she took my hand as we walked quietly back to the hut.

When we arrived, Miriam announced she had found the portal. It lay inside a piece of sculpture shaped something like a ruptured watermelon, with a crack down the side just big enough for an emaciated umbral to squeeze through. The crack was, of course, the portal; and it remained to be seen if we humans could fit into the gate. We would have serious difficulty at the best of times. It would be next to impossible to squash through quickly and quietly.

Alas, «quickly and quietly» was exactly what we needed. After hours of formal discussions, Wheezle and Kiripao had established only one point: the umbrals would double-cross us as soon as bargaining concluded. The moment they handed over the agreed-upon price, any outsiders in the village would change from «merchants with goods to sell» into «targets with gold to steal». Of course, the fiends hadn't said this in so many words; but the undercurrents of gloating hostility were too obvious for our companions to miss. The gnome and elf insisted we must have an escape route ready by the time negotiations ended.