Arch Wizard

foolishly.'

Reld moved his mouth as if he was going to make some sort of reply, but then flushed, closed it again, bowed his head in acceptance, and stepped back into the night.

I know JUST bow he feels, Rod thought, as his own verbal flood flowed on. Humiliated, an idiot, a failure. Some fantasy book hero I'm turning out to be. Wandering along like a dimwit while others do what they like with me, smirk at me, and deem me an utter dolt. And they're right, every last one of them.

He paused for breath, and Syregorn's gentle voice returned. 'So that's all you know about the Aumrarr? Well, then, tell me more of what you know of the world you came from, this Earth.'

Syregorn was smiling, but the smile never touched his eyes. He went right on with his careful, quiet questions-and helplessly, while fear grew inside him like a cold, awakening worm, Rod obediently babbled on and on about the real world.

The warcaptain wanted to know about everything. What people wore, how they locked their doors at night, how they spent each day.

Of course. Syregorn was learning all about a foe, so be could invade them and swiftly do all the right things to conquer. And I'm telling him, God help me. Shit. Earth was about to become doomed.

The mists faded away, leaving Garfist and Iskarra lying on a cold stone floor in each other's arms.

They were lying at about the center of an empty, plain stone room, in a castle or fortress somewhere, and there was a singing stillness in the air that smelt of magic and emptiness. They were alone… or at least it felt like there was nothing alive nearby.

'Malragard?' Garfist whispered hoarsely. Isk shrugged her wordless reply, then patted at his ribs to signal that she'd like to be free of his tight embrace.

Gar obligingly opened his arms, and she rolled out of them and up to her feet in one supple, eel-like wriggle, to crouch and peer alertly in all directions.

There wasn't much to see. Two doors out of the room, on opposite sides and both closed, and the stillness-and that very faint, high singing sound-hung unchanged.

Isk crept noiselessly to one door, listened, then went and put her ear to the other. Evidently hearing nothing, she beckoned Garfist to join her, and he rolled slowly to his knees and then rose, stifling his usual grunts-and noticed the singing sound dying away as he moved away from where they'd been lying. When he took a step back closer, it grew stronger again.

So the singing sound was Malraun's gate, awake and ready to whisk them back to Lyraunt Castle-and witlessness, trapped by the mindgem.

Bugger all, they'd slammed their door out behind them locked-tight.

Garfist fervently hoped that wouldn't be one of the largest glo rking mistakes of their lives.

Iskarra nodded to tell him she'd noticed the shift in sound, too, and promptly beckoned him to follow her back to the first door she'd listened at.

He shrugged acceptance, and obeyed.

Iskarra flattened herself against the wall beside that door, took hold of his nearest ear the moment he was close enough, and tugged him gently forward until she could whisper right into it, her breath warm and ticklish, her lips brushing his earlobe.

'Stay quiet, Gar, and stick with me. We go slow and try to stay back from anything that could make a noise-and we don't open things until we really have to.'

'So as to not to alert any guards,' Garfist whispered.

'Or worse,' Isk agreed, her whisper ghost-quiet. 'You know how wizards love guardian things. Pillars and lamps and who knows what other sorts of furniture, that all turn into beasts with jaws and claws. Usually right behind you, after you've passed.'

'Unnh,' Garfist grunted in unwilling agreement, unpleasant memories rising.

'Touch or take nothing that looks valuable until we've agreed on it. Constantly seek ways out and down. We're here to get out unseen, remember, not loot the citadel of Malraun. I'll bet he could trace us, to the deepest caves in the farthest lands of Falconfar, if we took just one coin from here.'

'Aye, aye,' Gar growled. 'I hear ye. Ye're going to stand here and talk me to death-and when Malraun strides in through this door, d'ye think that'll work on him?'

'Idiot,' Iskarra hissed, eyes flashing. 'How long ago would you've been dead, if not for me?'

Garfist grew a slow grin. 'Aye, but I'd've died from that smith dropping his anvil on my head, as I slept after slap-an'-tickle with his three daughters. I'd've greeted the Falcon a happy man.'

Iskarra dug just the tips of her fingers into a certain bulge in his breeches, and murmured, 'Do all men think only with this?'

'Nay, Snakehips. I make 'em use their own,' Gar told her with a grin. Isk rolled her eyes at him, put a silencing finger across his lips, and bent to listen at the closed door again.

Then she straightened, nodded, mimed the motions of him drawing his sword-so he did so, careful to step away from the wall and do it carefully and silently-leaned in again, put her hand on the pull-ring… and drew open the door.

No menace they could see, and no sounds or movements. Nothing. The darkness of the revealed stone passage told them their room must be lit by magic, though the radiance was so faint, and coming from everywhere and nowhere, that they'd not noticed.

Iskarra leaned back into Gar to breathe her words into his ear. 'Come, but don't let the door slam behind you, or even shut,' she commanded. 'We have to move as if a Doom of Falconfar is sitting reading, or dozing, in a room somewhere nearby-a room with an open door.'

'We do?'

'Just shut up and humor me, Old Ox. Save your questions-and attempts to think-for later.'

'Why?'

Isk answered that hoarse question with a long, cold look, holding it until Gar grew uncomfortable and started to shuffle from one booted foot to another.

'I'll be good, Isk,' he whispered, finally.

'See that you are-at least until we're well out of here,' she breathed into his ear, and slipped out into the passage.

Almost immediately, one of her hands returned, to beckon Garfist. Moving gingerly, with exaggerated care to keep quiet, he followed out of the door, leaving it open.

The soft light in the room cast a gentle fan of radiance out into the darkness, and he thrust a forefinger twice into Isk's shoulder, and when she turned, pointed at it.

She shrugged, captured that finger, and tugged it gently, signifying he should move onward with her. Lifting his feet carefully to avoid the customary scrape on stone of his boots, he did so.

The passage ran straight, past several closed and featureless stone doors, then became a descending flight of stairs without archway or fanfare, its smooth and featureless ceiling curving to run downward with it.

They went down the steps in slow, careful silence, Isk in the lead. She froze the moment she could see what the stair emptied out into: a large room that held an oval pool of a glowing, deep emerald green oil or water or something that surged and rippled in slow, constant, and silent motion, as if it were alive and lazily thrusting up serpent-like, wriggling spines or backs, large curved claws, and short-lived tentacles that always became tubes that vented out gases with tiny gasps, and then sank back into the oily green life. There was a faint, sharp smell in the air, something like soured wine, and this vinegar-like taint was almost certainly coming from the pool, but.

Isk kept well back from the pool, and moved purposefully to the right, to where she could see a way opening out of the room, into another dark, narrow passage.

Garfist followed, sword in hand but stepping no farther from the wall than he had to. He knew what was making her hasten, because he was starting to feel it, too.

An intense feeling of being watched. A feeling that was coming from the radiant green contents of the pool…