the creature’s throat. Blood spattered the giant’s comrades, and scattered the coins. Shadows exploded from the giant’s form. The towering creature tried to stand but collapsed before getting out of its crouch. Cale jerked Weaveshear free.
Riven appeared behind the giant across from Cale and put a sabre into the creature’s back. It started to stand, roared, and turned. Riven slit its throat before it gained its feet and it fell, bleeding, leaking shadows and gurgling.
The other two giants lurched to their feet, scattering coins, and pulled their blades, but Cale and Riven were already upon them. With one saber Riven deflected a wild stab by a giant, with the other he opened a gash in the creature’s chest. The giant stumbled backward, slipped in the mud, and fell. Riven drove both sabers through its chest and heart.
Cale lunged forward at the last giant, feinted low, drew the creature off balance, and drove Weaveshear through its mail and into its gut. He jerked the blade free as the giant roared with pain, bent double. A two handed slash to the exposed neck separated its head from its body. Weaveshear leaked blood and shadows.
Riven and Cale went back to back as the corpses spasmed, watching the darkness for more giants, shadows, anything.
“Nothing,” Cale said.
“Nothing,” agreed Riven.
Both relaxed.
Riven spit on the corpses and said, “We keep moving.”
The rain had already washed most of the giants’ blood into the ground, but did nothing to clean the earth of the invasion the giants represented.
“We walk through the town, first,” Cale said. “Ensure there are no survivors. Besides, someone needs to bear witness to this.”
“Yes,” Riven said, wiping his blades clean on a giant’s trousers.
They left the corpses of the giants behind them and walked the streets of Archenbridge. Shutters and open doors banged open and closed in the wind. Murky water overflowed catch barrels and horse troughs. Plazas stood empty, forlorn, haunted only by the past.
Hints of a rapid evacuation littered the streets—loose sacks lay strewn about. Stacked barrels, coffers, chairs, divans, and other household furnishings had been left outside on the walks but never loaded onto carts, all of it a testament to lives disturbed, changed forever. A cooking pan lay half submerged in the mud of the street; Cale could not take his eyes from it.
They found no survivors but also no human bodies, though the carcasses of dogs and cats haunted doorways, curled up as if the creatures had fallen asleep and never awakened. Perhaps they had scratched at the doors for owners long departed before the life-draining storm had finally taken them.
Riven noted each dead dog, his eye hard, and Cale imagined him keeping a count in his mind, a ledger for which he would ultimately hold Kesson Rel to account.
The buildings of Archenbridge struck Cale in a way that the twisted plains had not, in a way that the bodies back on the Dawnpost had not. The empty structures represented not just a loss of life, but the loss of a way of life. The areas affected by the Shadowstorm would never be the same. Emerging from the wind and rain and darkness like the gravestones of titans, the buildings seemed like monuments to a lost world. By the time they reached the edge of the town and the graceful stone arch that spanned the Arkhen, Cale felt exhausted. Archenbridge was Sembia, was all of Faerûn, if they did not stop the storm. The realization weighed on him.
They passed the bridge’s toll gate and walked the arch side by side, saying nothing. The churn from the storm had turned the Arkhen’s waters brown. They seethed under the rain’s onslaught. Hundreds of dead fish floated in the current, gathered in the shallows.
Halfway across the bridge, a flutter in Cale’s stomach stopped him. His mouth went dry and he found it hard to breathe. The shadows around him roiled.
“Feel that,” he said to Riven.
Riven tried to speak but failed, and nodded instead.
Both of them slid their blades free and sank into the darkness on one side of the bridge. With an effort of will, Cale deepened the shadows around them.
“Kesson?” Riven asked.
Cale shook his head. He didn’t know.
The dread grew palpable, thicker and more oppressive than the rain. It weighed on Cale’s chest, stole his breath, and set his heart to racing. Shadows boiled from him, from Weaveshear. Beside him, Riven looked as tense as a bowstring.
What in the Nine Hells is causing that? Riven signed with a shaking hand.