mapwork of convoluted spell craft flared across the face, chiselled with charged lines of runes. Lit blue by a chained might that dazzled and dwarfed him, Asandir stood unmoved, while from below, the fog moiled up in disturbed billows to hedge Rockfell round with anvil formations like thunderheads.
Though only nature responded in reaction to the proximity of energized coils of power, the likeness to the moving mists of Desh-thiere left Dakar hollow with dread. The sun had dipped low. What sky remained visible glowed aquamarine, the moon a burning disc as fey in its light as the dagger-edged fire of raw spells. But these rang in high, subliminal vibration, haloed by silver-blue veilings of disturbed fog. Then abruptly as the power had been raised, it flickered, flared violet, and faded.
Where rock had been lay a door.
Dakar gaped. ‘How did you do that?’
Asandir muttered words about physical rearrangement, and briskly hooked up his pack. A second later he vanished into the square black vault that formed the unsealed entrance to Rockfell.
Flash-blind and blinking, Dakar advanced more cautiously. Swallowed at once by the dark, he felt oppressed to the point of suffocation. But the air came and went from his lungs, unrestricted. The innards of the mountain were dry, bone-cold and smelled like metal filings and dust. The doorway at his back seemed a cube rinsed with light, as dangerously transient as a tienelle vision. ‘You didn’t happen to bring candles?’ Dakar asked wistfully.
Out of pity, Kharadmon made a light. Its spark spread through gloom to reveal a bare chamber carved on floor and walls in complex patterns and runes of guard. At the centre rested a slab, set askew to reveal a pit containing a bottomless well of blind darkness. The cobwebbed rungs of a ladder poked through, its origin swallowed in shadow.
Asandir hefted the sack with the flask and started down. Before he had done three steps, dry wood gave way beneath his boot. Slivers whispered falling through air and long seconds elapsed before their impact echoed back, proving the shaft had a bottom.
The well was dreadfully deep.
Unfazed at being poised on rotten footing over what amounted to an abyss, the sorcerer said, ‘Kharadmon? You’ll need to strengthen the ladder or Dakar will surely break his neck.’
‘I’m not going down there!’ The Mad Prophet folded his arms across his chest and obstinately planted his toes.
‘If you don’t, you’re quite likely to freeze.’ Pragmatic, Asandir waited while the rungs under his hands flared red under Kharadmon’s binding. He moved on, his hair stirred by air currents that funnelled down into the pit.
Dakar steeled himself and swung onto the ladder that dropped away into the unknown. His hands left sweatmarks on wood still warmed from enchantment. He forced himself to start down, while Kharadmon’s light travelled with him until he was encircled by stone walls. The descent seemed to go on forever. His calves quivered as overstressed muscles bore his weight. The Mad Prophet could not shake the impression that the well had been cut deeper than the roots of Rockfell mountain itself.
The jar as his foot struck the bottom almost startled him out of his skin. He looked about. The shaft ended in a five-sided cell, scrawled with entangled sigils and spiralling lattices of power that made the eyes burn and the head swim in vicious, twisty dizziness.
‘Don’t stare,’ Asandir cautioned. ‘The patterns here both dazzle and bind. You could lose your mind in this maze of wards to the point where even I can’t call you back.’
Such were the safeguards upon the chamber that the sorcerer’s warning fell dead against the air. Even the echoes were trapped. Dakar ripped his gaze away, then knuckled his eyes until they teared. ‘What was the last thing confined here?’
Kharadmon snorted in contempt. ‘You might better ask what last escaped. Everything ever shut in here eventually worked its way out.’
‘Not the iyats,’ Asandir contradicted. He ran his fingers over the walls. His touch raised uneasy vibrations in the air that riled the skin but made no sound. Green sparks danced from the contact causing Dakar to grit his teeth. Unperturbed, the sorcerer added, ‘Those were released, you’ll remember, to add havoc to Davien’s rebellion.’
‘We’re not going to sleep here,’ Dakar interrupted. He felt claustrophobic, and strongly inclined to throw up.
Asandir glanced abstractedly over one shoulder. ‘I advise you to try. You’ll feel less ill with your eyes closed, and rechecking the symmetry of these wards will likely take most of the night.’
‘You didn’t need me,’ Dakar retorted. ‘Why insist that I come?’
‘But Kharadmon told you already.’ Impatient, Asandir abandoned the intricacies of his spell-work. He turned full around and gave Dakar a regard that was testy enough to peel skin. ‘Your body needed the exercise.’
Which point incensed Dakar to black rage. He filled his lungs to shout imprecations.
No word emerged. His jaw opened, shut and opened again like a fish’s. His eyes bulged. Then, in some odd fit of difficulty that had no visible cause, his features crumpled in frustration and his knees buckled. His Fellowship master caught him before he collapsed.
Laughing, Asandir lowered the Mad Prophet’s bulk the rest of the way to the floor. ‘How timely.’
Kharadmon’s ripe chuckle answered. ‘Quite.’ His image unfurled, posed in satisfaction over Dakar. ‘He’ll sleep through the night. Good. That should leave us some peace in which to work.’
The next thing Dakar knew, Asandir was shaking him awake.
‘Get up,’ the sorcerer insisted. ‘You’re lying across space we need for the final defence ward.’
Dakar grumbled, and finally yielded to the prodding that urged him back to his feet. His bones ached from hours spent on hard and chilly stone, and his eyes felt bored through by a blast of unbearable light. He determined after a moment that the glare emanated from the centre of the pit. He blinked, squinted through hurting vision and, at the heart of the dazzle, barely made out the shadowy outline of the flask that contained the Mistwraith.
About then he noticed that his skin tingled as if drenched by a tonic, and all of his body hair had lifted. Throughout his service with Asandir, he had never witnessed such a presence of raw force. For once in his life awed to silence, he gaped.
