Dark Crusade by Karl Edward Wagner Read Free Book Online Page A

see their fear-twisted faces. A shadow had spoken to her, and all else seemed no more than a dream and the echo of a dream.
    The night was cloudless, the stars cold and bright. Yet it seemed to Erill that a legion of shadows marched across the heavens, writher across the lurid moon. Coiling down from the abyss of night, the shadows danced and slithered from beyond the stars, crept behind her in a hellish pack as she followed the winding streets and alleys of Gillera.
    The soft scuff of her sandals came distant and dimly to her cars. The rest of the city seemed enveloped in black cobweb, muffling even the throb of her heart. Her skin was pale with the night's chill, but the only thing Erill felt was the cold, evil disc that burned her clenched fist.
    The city gate was a glaring brilliance of light that stung her eyes. Erill hesitated a moment, then strode forward.
    The relic of wars of past centuries, the gates of Gillera were ponderous valves of cast bronze, heavily fortified from twin barbicans. Grim-faced guardsmen manned the fortifications, knowing that an attack must come from this quarter, unless the Satakis were prepared to sustain ruinous casualties along the wall. While a human wave with scaling ladders might carry a portion of the wall, they would have to cross the outer defenses of dry moat and stake-set earthworks under murderous fire from archers behind the parapet.
    Tense figures stared out into the night, watching the growing sea of wavering torchlight. Within the gateway, soldiers and armed citizens milled about, talking in low voices, seeing to various tasks, catching snatches of sleep. A few gave note to the ashen-faced girl who wove a course between the jostling bodies--from her set features, presumably seeking a lover or kinsman amongst the massed defenders. There were many such, seeking a tearful farewell on this night.
    Erill's mission was otherwise. Before the brazen gates Erill halted. Cold seeped through her breast, her heart no longer seemed to beat. The hateful blaze of fires and cressets scathed her flesh. A number of heads turned curiously toward the blonde girl who paused before the beleaguered portal.
    Moving as in dream, Erill hurled the onyx disc against the massive bronze doors, and cried out the phrases the shadow had whispered to her.
    A last-instant presentiment of doom. Shouts as those nearest to the girl whirled to seize her, silence her.
    Then darkness smothered the fires and the torches, and from the stars the shadow pack crawled down to slay and to slay.
    Erill screamed, fell back--shielding her face in her arms. To see a man writhe beneath the strangling embrace of his own shadow is a monstrous thing, nor does the vision seem less hideous when it is mirrored over a hundred times.
    The blackness, riven by choked screams, was absolute, and clotted the area of the portal like some vast and misshapen spider. Erill heard her own voice screaming felt the hypnotic spell of the shadow lift from her soul. It was like an awakening from nightmare, and to reality that offered no refuge from the embrace of horror.
    Through slitted eyes she saw the shadow horde--grotesque densities of deeper blackness than the night--fling aside their dead, stream toward the bronze gates. The sigil of Sataki, swollen to colossal proportions, overspread the brazen valves where Erill's hand had cast it.
    Shadow hands drew at the iron bolts; shadow forms heaved against the massive valves. With the deceptively slow majesty of a falling tree, the brazen portals of Gillera swung ponderously open.
    Drained, half-senseless, Erill slumped amidst the twisted bodies of the slain, as the shadow pack streamed past the yawning portal and into the darkness beyond. Dimly she was aware of a wild roaring, as of two monstrous winds. One was the panic-stricken cries of those within Gillera, suddenly aware that something from beyond the dark had opened their city to their slayers. The other was the blood-lusting howls of the Satakis as