He clambered up the steps, gripping the strongbox. Talzir and Gindrol followed. All three bowed at the Crone's approach. Barely acknowledging them, she tossed the sack she was holding at their feet. It landed with a clatter: the sound of gemstones clicking together.

When she reached out for the strongbox, Karas feigned reluctance. He shifted the box in his hands, making sure to draw her attention to it. The wood appeared gouged, as if it had been chewed on

"Is there a problem?" she asked. Her voice was as cold as a corpse.

"We were attacked." Karas said. "A bulette mistook the strongbox for its lunch."

"Good thing it didn't swallow the contents," Talzir piped up from behind him, "or it would have gotten a terrible stomach ache." He gave a nervous-sounding laugh.

The Crone's eyes narrowed. "Give it to me."

Karas shifted his feet. "But-"

"Give it to me!"

Karas obliged, lifting the strongbox. Just as the Crone's hand was about to touch it, he moved the box upward. Her hand passed through the illusionary lid and touched the voidstone. For the briefest of instants, her eyes widened in alarm and her mouth parted in a scream.

Then she was gone.

With a thought, Karas altered his form. His body doubled in size, changed gender, assumed the face he'd just been staring up at. His vest became a robe, his mask a skullcap, and the dragon-skin ring on his finger multiplied itself by eight and turned silver.

He stared disdainfully down at the other two Nightshadows and shouted in a cold female voice, "Where did he go? Speak!"

The undead drow glanced back and forth between the transformed Karas and the spot where the real Crone had just been standing. One of them pawed at Karas's sleeve, and he warned it off with a glare.

Gindrol and Talzir, meanwhile, played their parts to perfection. Shuffling, nervous, they refused to meet the "Crone's" eyes. On cue, the boat rocked, as if an invisible person were stepping into it. Karas stared in that direction. "Ah. Lost his nerve, did he?"

Gindrol bent to scoop up the sack, but Karas stamped a foot down on it. He pretended to open the strongbox. The illusionary lid sprang open, and he looked inside. The voidstone was a dark, fist-sized hollow at the center of the box. With a satisfied nod, he pretended to close the missing lid.

He removed his foot from the sack. "Go," he ordered the other two.

Cringing, they retrieved the sack and scrambled back to the boat.

All part of the act.

It was lost on the undead, of course. The animated corpses that surrounded Karas hadn't the intelligence to understand the subtle scene the three Nightshadows had just played out. But the quth-maren that stepped out of a nearby doorway did. Tall and gaunt, made up of nothing more than oozing muscle stitched rudely over bone, it stared at Karas with eyes that wept blood. As Karas met its stare, panic welled inside him. He felt if he were drowning, thrashing about in panic, going under in a sea of blood.

Masked Lord, he pleaded fiercely, strengthen me.

The panic dissipated, leaving only a nervous bead of sweat that trickled down the small of Karas's back. He glared at the animated dead who clustered around him, fawning for his attention. "Clear a path for me," he ordered.

The quth-maren nodded. It waved a hand, and the plague-killed drow standing on the dock folded to the ground, lifeless once more. Then it gave a hacking cough, deep in its chest. A wad of blood-tinged mucous shot from its mouth and landed on the stomach of a corpse that had Iain down immediately in front of Karas. The acidic spit sizzled, burning clean through the body, down to the stone beneath.

The quth-maren gave a gurgling chuckle and padded up the dock, leaving bloody footprints in its wake.

Behind Karas, Gindrol and Talzir pulled away from the dock. The splashes of their oars were rapidly lost amid the clattering of the skulls overhead and the wails of the ghosts that flitted above.

Karas forced his shoulders erect and followed the quth-maren with a haughty, confident step. They walked through the ruined city. Everywhere Karas looked lay plague victims, preserved by fell magic. They rose at his approach, bowing in subservience to the Crone he appeared to be. Some plucked at his cloak with blistered fingers; he shrugged them away imperiously.

Movement down a side street caught his eye. He glanced in that direction and saw a monstrous hound nearly four times his height, made up of a seething mass of bodies, with teeth made from broken femurs. It sniffed at the dead, selected one, and closed its teeth around it. Lifting the corpse into the air, the monstrous hound shook its head, scattering chunks of flesh left and right. It paused in this gruesome task to stare back at Karas, blood dribbling from its mouth like drool.

Karas averted his eyes and walked on. All around him, however, were equally horrific sights. Ghouls scuttled like crabs across the corpses, snapping off choice pieces and sucking on them. Specters drifted in and out of walls, leaving a rime of frost in their wake. Finger-sized gravecrawlers wriggled into the nostrils and ears of the bodies that lay on the ground, gradually calcifying the dead.

Karas had seen it all before. Just as they had then, his guts churned in horror. He'd thought himself ready. It had been five years since the fall of Maerimydra, after all. Five years since he'd escaped from the horror of a city conquered both from without, by the army of Kurgoth Hellspawn, and from within, by the traitorous priestesses of House T'sarran.

You survived then, he told himself sternly. You'll survive now.

But his thoughts kept turning traitorously back to that time. To all the near misses, the almost-fatal mistakes. Becoming the consort of one of Kiaransalee's priestesses, for example. How badly that had gone! Later, he'd thrown in his lot with a group of survivors hiding in the ruins. All had gone well until they decided to take on the Crones, a suicidal task. Karas had taken his leave of them, fleeing Maerimydra with the sackful of the treasures he'd been able to scavenge.

Later, he'd heard they'd actually done it: thrown down Kiaransalee's high priestess with the help of adventurers from beyond the city. That thought should have bolstered him, given him the confidence he so desperately needed. But he was haunted still by the memories of the long months he'd spent constantly on the run from the undead. The moans of the ghosts above reminded him of the shrieks that had cut down the other members of his House like invisible scythes. The clattering that filled the air reminded him of the bony touch of a skeletal hand on his shoulder.

Stop thinking about it, he told himself sternly. He forced down the gorge that rose in his throat. He would do as his god commanded. Discover what the Crones were doing with the voidstone, learn how to stop it, then get out. The Masked Lord would protect him, just as he had in Maerimydra. And if Karas died… well, then the fear that roiled in his guts would end. He'd be taken up into the Masked Lord's shadowy embrace.

He knew where he had to go: into the temple atop that central spire. The Acropolis of Thanatos was the only logical place for the voidstone to be delivered to. The blue-green glow that suffused the column it stood on confirmed it. The Faerzress was brightest at the top of the spire, just underneath the temple. It pulsed with an eye-stinging glow.

The quth-maren led Karas to the base of a staircase that spiraled up to the temple. On each side of the stair stood a boneclaw: a skeletal humanoid twice Karas's height with fingers that ended in scything claws. One of the boneclaws lashed out as Karas approached, its claws extending until they were several paces long. Their tips plunged into the rock in front, back and to either side of Karas, forming the bars of a razor-sharp cage.