to kill their master.
Wind sighed across the window sill. The sea rushed to the shore far below and rushed out again. Somewhere a dragon's corpse floated, turning up, belly to the sky. Gulls would feed on that corpse, and sooner or later the sea would soften what even swords could not hurt. Then the gulls and fishes would pry the scales from the belly and pry the flesh from the bones.
'I will tell you,' Dalamar said to the dying man on the bed, 'what you have so dearly wanted to know. I have come to kill you, Tramd, and it will be my personal pleasure. You killed many good men and women in the battle for Silvanesti.'
He stopped, watching the dwarf groan, watching his cracked lips bleed with his effort at speech. Standing there, Dalamar heard the forest burning. He heard the Wildrunners shouting. He heard a dragon dying, and the last prayer of a cleric who had put all his faith in gods who did not seem to know or care. Sunlight ran on the honed edge of the axe's blade, sliding down the curve as Dalamar shifted it from hand to hand.
'I have come in the name of Ladonna of the Tower of High Sorcery. I have come in the name of those who revere the High Art, the gift of the three magical children. I have come in my own name, Tramd Stonestrike, to remove you from the ranks of Her Dark Majesty's servants. There will be Light,' he said, 'and there will be Dark.'
He lifted the axe higher, right over his head.
The dwarf heard the lifting, the sigh of air on the blade. He groaned and found a word. 'No,' he sobbed, 'no.'
'Yes,' said Dalamar, very gently. 'Yes.'
He let fall the axe, a headsman, an executioner come to avenge early deaths and late.
'Yes,' he said to the dead man. 'There will be balance.'
Dalamar put back the axe, the blood still running. He rolled the corpse to the floor and snatched up a sheet from the bed. With the silk he wrapped up the head, the eyes still staring, the ruined mouth still gaping.
'My lord,' said one, a human woman, bowing to him as she spoke. 'What is your will?'
He looked at her, and she cringed from his glare. 'Go,' he said, and he didn't care if she took the word to mean she must leave him alone or she must go out from the citadel and never come back. They made, servants and soldiers, the choice they had wanted to make for long years. They fled.
Dalamar didn't watch them. Their running footsteps meant nothing to him. He carried the head of Tramd o' the Dark, wrapped in bloody silk, back to the chamber where he had left Regene. She lay dead, her blue eyes wide, her lips a little parted. He knelt beside her, brushed her dark hair from her face, and he closed her eyes. He stayed that way for a time, listening to people flee the castle. Then he lifted her in his arms, took up the proof of the dwarf mage's death, and spoke a word of magic.
The floor fell away. The walls fell away. In the grip of the transport spell, Dalamar Nightson shouted, and this time he didn't cry a spell. This time he shouted a curse.
Out on the ocean, as far as the rim of the Blood Sea of Istar, sailors pointed north and they pointed east. A great fire burned on the Worldscap Mountains on Karthay. The flames of it reached as high as the tallest peak, then higher still. The smoke of the burning roiled out over the sea, darkening the day to dusk.
Epilogue
Dalamar walked through light and through darkness, up a winding stone staircase that seemed to have no end. Once he looked back over his shoulder, and he could not see the steps behind. They were lost in shadow and the fitful flaring of the torches upon the wall. He had no hand-light, for something had been done to dampen his magic. In the pit of his belly, fear fluttered.
The darkness of Shoikan Grove had not frightened him. He had walked beneath trees whose limbs were arms reaching down to grab him, through shadows where disembodied eyes glared at him. Beneath his feet, twigs had turned to skeletal hands, those hands plucking at the hem of his robe, but he had not faltered. Not even when ghosts came wandering out from the depths of that haunted wood did he allow himself fear. He had entered the precincts of the Tower of High Sorcery at Palanthas as boldly as though he were walking into his own home. The lightless courtyard, the great doors that opened of their own accord, even the soft, almost gentle voice, that bade him, 'Enter, apprentice,' did not disconcert him. But now, here, without his magic, Dalamar felt fear.
It is but an effect of his magic, he told himself as he went ever upward. He will not permit my magic, and so that is what must be. Here is the road I have chosen, and it has wound all the way from Silvanost to Palanthas. This is the road I will trust.
'Shalafi,' he whispered, trying out the title, the Elvish word for 'master.' 'It will be as you wish.'
Up through the darkness and the light he went, never missing a step, though so many lay hidden in shadow and not all were of the same depth or breadth. No rail warded the unwary climber. A fall from this staircase would be a killing plunge, and yet it seemed to Dalamar that he'd found the rhythm of the uneven steps in the first moment he began his ascent. The higher he went the quicker his pulse-the old feeling he'd always known when he wandered from the safe ways, the quiet paths.
He came to a landing and passed it by. He did not know how or why, but he understood that he must keep climbing. Now as he went, a feeling of having been here before stirred in him, as though he had been to this place long ago. He had not been here in all his life, but still the feeling persisted.
His footfalls echoed from the walls, those echoes falling into the well below and whispering back up again, as though he were being followed. The hair raised up on the back of his neck; it prickled on his arms. Dalamar shivered, but he would not stop. He must go on, up and up and around the long spiral. He passed another landing, and when he glanced left, he saw a corridor brightly lit, the torches on the walls glimmering into the distance. Door after door he glimpsed, all shut tight, and yet he had the feeling that these rooms were occupied. By whom?
Fear whispered, By what?
When he thought his legs would carry him not another step, the staircase simply ended before a broad wooden door. Two torches stood in brackets on each side of that door, their flames like orange pennants waving in a breeze Dalamar did not feel. He did not look around to see why the fire flared. He did not look up or down or back. He could not, for he stood now in front of a door he had, indeed, seen before. The doorknob shone, polished silver in the torchlight. Shaped like a skull, the eye-sockets filled with the gleam of firelight, that knob invited his grip.
The quickening of his pulse became the drumbeat of his heart, a rhythm of excitement ran in him like magic itself. He'd stood here before, in a vision shown him by the polished platinum mirrors in the Circle of Darkness. While clerics and Wildrunners, a prince and a princess waited to mete out to him the exile's fate, he had seen this door, this very handle shaped like a skull. A sound came from the darkness, from behind, beside, before. The grating of chain on stone, the quiet creeping of judgment and revelation. So hard did his heart beat now that Dalamar wondered whether the hammering could be heard throughout the Tower.
He took a breath to steady himself.
Every moment he'd spent on the road away from the White elven magic and into the darker realm of Nuitari's magic had led him here, like inexorable steps upon a foreordained path. He reached for the silver skull. His hand closed round it, his thumb sought and found the smooth round depression of an eye-socket. He composed himself. By sheer force of will, he drove from his mind every thought, each trace of memory of the moment he accepted his mission for the Conclave. It was worth his life, perhaps his soul, to hide that, and he had no magic to assist him. Neither would he know if he succeeded until the moment he failed.
And if he failed-!
He must not think of that. He must not permit even the smallest thought of failure.
He gripped the silver skull, then pushed gently inward. The door opened, as in his vision it had. Light poured out, golden, flooding the corridor, and heat came with it as though someone within could not feel the warmth of the summer night but stood always in winter, shivering against cold. Dark against that light, a slight young man stood. He wore a robe of simple, unadorned black wool. The hood was thrown back, revealing a face Dalamar had never thought to see, even in nightmare. It was not the golden skin that set his nerves to jangling, nor the white, white hair. It was the eyes, the pupils dark as moonless midnight, each shaped like an hourglass.
'He calls himself the Master of Past and Present,' Par-Salian had said. In the name of all gods, Dalamar
