The aged gates, allegedly locked for fifteen years, had opened smoothly and without a sound -- as if they had been oiled and put into working order within the past several days.
Something was very wrong.
A shadow bulked in front of her, and she started with alarm; she pulled the sword in a defensive move before she realized that her 'enemy' was Warrl.
He reached for her arm and his teeth closed gently on her tunic; he tugged at her sleeve. That meant Tarma wanted her.
'You didn't meet with anything?' Kethry whispered.
Warrl snorted.
This was too easy; all her instincts were in an uproar. Too easy by far. She suddenly realized what their easy access to this place meant. This was a trap!
And now Kethry felt a shrill alarm course through her every nerve -- a double alarm. Need was alerting her to a woman in the deadliest danger, and very nearby --
-- and the bond of she'enedran was resonating with soul-deep threat to her blood-sister. Tarma was in trouble.
As if to confirm her fears, Warrl threw up his head and voiced his battle-cry, and charged within, leaving Kethry behind.
And given the urgency of Need's pull, that could only mean one thing.
Thalhkarsh was here -- and he had the Sworn One at his nonexistent mercy.
The time for subterfuge was over.
Kethry pulled her ensorcelled blade with her left hand, and caused a blue-green witchlight to dance before her with a gesture from her right; then kicked open the doors of the temple and flung herself frantically through them. She landed hard against the dingy white-plastered wall of a tiny, cobwebbed anteroom, bruising her shoulder; and found herself staring foolishly at an empty chamber.
Another door stood in the opposite wall, slightly ajar. She inched along the wall and eased it open with the tip of her blade. The witchlight showed nothing beyond it but a brick-walled tunnel that led deeper into the temple proper. Warrl must already have run down this way.
She moved stealthily through the door, and into the corridor, praying to find Tarma, and soon. The internal alerts of both her blade and her blood-bond were nigh-unbearable, and she hardly dared contemplate what that meant to Tarma's well-being.
But the corridor twisted and turned like a kadessarun, seemingly without end. With every new corner she expected to find something -- but every time she rounded a corner she saw only another long, dust-choked extension of the corridor behind her. The dust showed no tracks at all, not even Warrl's. Could she have somehow come the wrong way? But there were only two directions to choose -- forward, or back the way she had come. Back she would never go; that left only forward. And forward was yard after yard of blank-walled corridor, with never a door or a break of any kind. She slunk on and on in a kind of nightmarish entrancement in which she lost all track of time; there was only the endlessly turning corridor before her and the cry for help within her. Nothing else seemed of any import at all. As the urgings of her geas-blade Need and the bond that tied her to Tarma grew more and more frantic, she was close to being driven nearly mad with fear and frustration. She was being distracted; so successfully in fact, that it wasn't until she'd wasted far too much precious time trying to thread the maze that she realized what it must be --
-- a magical construct, meant to delay her, augmented by spells of befuddlement.
'You bastard!' she screamed at the invisible Thalhkarsh, enraged by his duplicity. He had made a serious mistake in doing something that caused her to become angry; that rage was useful, it fueled her power. She gathered it to her, made a force of it instead of allowing it to fade uselessly; sought and found the weak point of the spell. She sheathed Need, and spreading her arms wide over her head, palms facing each other, blasted with the whiteheat of her anger.
Mage-energies formed a glowing blue-white arc between her upraised hands; a sorcerer's wind began to stir around her, forming a miniature whirlwind with herself as the eye. With a flick of her wrists she reversed her hands to hold them palmoutward and brought her arms down fully extended to shoulder height; the mage-light poured from them to form a wall around her, then the wall expanded outward. The brick corridor walls about her flared with scarlet as the glowing wall of energy touched them; they shivered beneath the wrath-fired mageblast, wavered and warped like the mirages they were. There was a moment of resistance; then, soundlessly, they vanished.
She saw she was standing in what had been the outer, common sanctuary; an enormous room, supported by two rows of pillars whose tops were lost in the shadows of the ceiling. Tracks in the dust showed she had been tracing the same circling path all the time she had thought she was traversing the corridor. Her anger brightened
