It did not surprise him, not really, since she had no one but the two of them to really go by. Nonetheless, as he watched the couples sweep across the floor, Dru was struck by a feeling of dread. Looking at them, he could see her as other Vraad would see her… fully adult and ready, physically, at least, to make her mark among them.
To use and be used, as was the Vraad way.
With a furious gesture, he dismissed the dancers. They dwindled instantly into tiny whirlwinds of dust, puppet images drawn from the life of the world itself. Unlike golems, who had some solidity and could comprehend orders, the dancers were no more than intricate toys, an art form that occasionally amused Vraad. He had taught it to his daughter when she was only a few years old and had been pleased with her immediate skill with the not-so-simple spell.
Dru was not so pleased now. There were too many things to worry about to keep adding to the list, though this was really part of his first and foremost fear, he supposed.
“Sharissa!”
“Here, Father.”
She came to him as more of a mist than the child that he had expected. The billowing silver dress that clung to her proportions reminded him of what he had just tried to force from his mind, that, though only two decades old, his daughter was a woman. For someone three millennia old, two decades seemed hardly enough time to learn to walk.
Tall, though she only came to his chin, Sharissa was not willowy. She had grown to fit her frame, looking exactly as she should have looked if she were a foot shorter. Her hair was silver-blue-natural, as far as Dru knew- and flowed down her backside to a point just below her waist. Like many Vraad, she had crystalline eyes, aquamarine gemstones that shone brightly when she was pleased with something. Her lips were thin, but perpetually curled upward at the ends. Even when Sharissa was angry, it was all she could do to force those lips into a straight line much less a frown.
“What is it, Father? Did something happen at the coming? Was there a duel?”
He stirred. Caught up in dreaming, again! “No, no duel. One, actually, but the Lord Tezerenee put an end to it.”
“That’s no good! A duel should reach a dramatic conclusion on its own!”
Among Dru’s earliest attempts to entertain his daughter had been tales of some of the more interesting duels he had witnessed… and occasionally been part of. Much to his regret, Sharissa had proven to have a Vraadish taste for such things. It was one of the chief reasons she had begged to go to the coming and one of the chief reasons Dru had not taken her. He was thankful that she had listened. By this stage of her powers, she could have easily ignored him and gone on her own.
“Never mind that now! I gave you some duties to perform while I was away.” Those duties had been partly to keep her busy for a time, but some of them had had true purposes. “Did you take care of them?”
Sharissa looked down. “Some of them… I… I was bored with them. I thought I’d finish in a few minutes.” Her eyes were wide with worry. “I only had the ball running for two or three minutes; that’s all!”
Dru forced himself to breathe calmly. “The crystals. That’s what I want to know about. Did you adjust their settings? Did you refocus the spell as I asked?”
“Oh, yes! I did that first because you made it sound the most important!”
“Serkadion Manee be praised!”
Hugging his daughter, Dru felt the first relief he had experienced since before his departure for the coming. If things were as they should be…
“What happened? What about the Lord Tezerenee’s plan? Did something go wrong?”
“I’ll tell you later. For the time being, we have work to do, you and I.” Releasing his daughter, Dru twisted his head around so that he could look Sirvak more or less in the eye. “To your sentinel duties, my friend. Some young drake of the patriarch’s might come looking for me. I want to know before he or they get here. I also want no one else prying into this!”
“Masterrrr.” The familiar stretched, spread its magnificent wings, and flew off. Dru had complete faith in the creature’s abilities; Sirvak was single-minded when it came to its duties. It would monitor and protect the castle better than either the sorcerer or his daughter.
“Come.” He took Sharissa’s hand. “This may literally prove to be a key to our predicament!”
As one, they folded inward and vanished from the theater-only to reappear at their exact starting point a second later.
Sharissa moaned, holding her head as if struck by some unseen assailant. Dru felt little better, finding even his legs unsteady.
“Father… the spell… like yesterday…”
“I know.” Yesterday, Dru had found it necessary to adjust the design of the eastern tower so as to allow for the softening of the soil beneath. From a base of rock, the earth had turned to so much mud. Despite his best efforts, however, the Vraad could not alter the composition of the ground. Mud it had become and mud it was determined to stay. In the end, Dru had been forced to create a bridge and pylon system… and that had taken two attempts. For a time, his spells had either gone awry or failed completely.
“Why not just let the castle take us there?”
Dru considered the plan and dismissed it. “I would rather not be caught between floors if the castle magic began to fail.”
“We walk, then.”
“That we do.”
Fortunately, their trek was a brief one. Had he chosen to visit his sanctum for any other reason, it was probable that he would have walked in the first place. His excitement was leading to carelessness, something the spellcaster knew was far too dangerous at this juncture. The two of them had been fortunate that they had only returned to their starting point. Another time and they might have materialized in the midst of a wall or floor.
A gigantic, metallic figure blocked the doorway through which Dru and Sharissa wished to pass. Its features were roughly hewed and vaguely reminiscent of a hound. The leviathan stood on a pair of blocky legs and held in its two enormous hands a shield taller than its master. A stylized gryphon decorated the shield.
Sharissa mouthed a single world. Though her voice was nearly inaudible, the golem understood. It stepped aside and went down on one knee, a supplicant before its lord and lady.
“Did you teach it to do that?” Dru asked, eyeing the unliving servant with distaste.
A momentary look of guilt passed across his daughter’s otherwise perfect visage. “Only this morning! I just thought it would be amusing to see such a horrible-looking creature act so civilly.”
“It will do this no more.” The other Vraad would have laughed at him. Kneeling was one of the least commands they would have given their own golems. Dru, though, had found it too ridiculous. There was nothing magnificent about commanding a chunk of metal that could walk and kill. The golem was still no more than a toy.
Another sign of how he had changed. Once, he too, would have laughed.
The golem rose silently, Dru’s words now law. The two Vraad continued on, the massive doors swinging open for them as they neared.
The sanctum of a Vraad was a far more individualistic thing than his or her outer appearance. Here, the subconscious played an active role in the design and maintenance. Here, a sorcerer’s mind was free to act and create, with varying results. In the chambers of his counterparts, Dru knew, one could expect to find anything within the realms of the imagination… and often beyond.
Dru’s own chambers, on the other hand, were bare-bare, that is, with the exception of countless crystals of all shapes and sizes orbiting or floating all about the room.
The spell, of which the gems were only the physical aspect, was the culmination of his work so far. Since the discovery of the realm beyond the veil, Dru had cleared out the paraphernalia from all past experiments-some of those items raising protest-and set aside everything for research into the nature of the wraith world. While others were pounding their magical might futilely against its phantom boundaries, he and a few of the more patient had sought out answers through careful study. That study had brought about, as a side result, the rediscovery-not discovery, as Barakas had put it-of the method of ka travel. The early Vraad had known of it, but for vague reasons no one could explain, they had forgotten soon after the founding generation of the Vraad race had passed on. He had discovered many other secrets as well, but all of them paled in the face of the greatest challenge. Somehow,
