the round wall and the tower itself, all the rest was so smashed as to be past recognition. Anything that was wood was charred nearly to dust, broken splinters of glass were melted where they lay. The sigils were no longer bright silver, but tarnished blacker than midnight to match the smoke-painted walls. Above, the round window was gone, the lead that had held the vanished panes of glass in place still hot and dripping into the stone circle.
I shakily sat up and looked around for Azalin. He hadn't made it through the opening. He hadn't made it at all.
His body lay near the west wall where the energies must have flung him like a leaf in a windstorm. His clothing was torn and shredded, but that was the least of the damage. The explosion had apparently sucked the life right from him, leaving behind a desiccated husk. He most resembled one of my skeletal servers, but with only slightly more flesh clinging to his bones. I saw the pattern of his ribcage, the outlines of his shrunken heart and lungs, the knobs of his joints. His face was the worst, his hawk-like features shriveled and dried, lips drawn back from the teeth with death's universal grin, the flesh on his skull cracked like old parchment dotted with matted tufts of sparse hair. The stench of full blown decay filled the room, overpowering all others.
There was no bringing him back. What few priests remained in Barovia had no power to restore life to the dead, and I had no spells that would help him. It would seem I would only have another servitor to add to my palace guard.
Damnation. So much work and for nothing. What had gone wrong? The Mists. It must have been the damned Mists.
Ever and always the source of my woes, the filthy stuff must have intervened and totally disrupted the workings of the spell. Azalin had advised me to perform a severance ceremony, but I'd chosen not to do so. I held to the idea that if I went through the portal, then Barovia would be dragged along as well in order to rejoin its original plane-if it had indeed even been the original plane. I had long suspected that many alternate realities existed, some varying greatly and some astonishingly similar. Azalin had met my theory of bringing Barovia with me with hearty contempt, but he was willing to allow me my way, having thought that at least he would be able to leave unhindered. Perhaps the world we had seen was so dissimilar to Barovia that they had somehow repelled one another. Perhaps I should not have been so stubborn. Damnation a thousand times over, I snarled to myself, furious, but weary right to my soul.
I would have to start again. Tired as I was now, I knew I would make another attempt. Azalin had done a monumental job of research, laying groundwork I could use, only I would first have to trace through each step to find out exactly what had gone wrong. It might take months, even years without his help, but so be it, somehow I would-
My disappointed and angry musings were interrupted when I heard a stirring from the direction of Azalin's body and turned to see what it was. My eyes widened and the hair on my neck rose.
It was moving-the wretched, decaying thing was moving. I sat frozen still as stone from the shock and waited for him to start screaming, for he would have to be in unthinkable agony from what had happened to his body. No sound came from him, though, only the spidery scrabblings of his hands brushing the stone flags, and the scrape of his exposed bones. His movements were feeble, groggy, as mine had been a few moments earlier.
Then the air about his withered body shimmered. The flesh clinging to his face filled out, became whole and healthy again. His features restored themselves back into their usual lines, though his eyes were shut. The skeletal body swelled to normalcy; the torn and dusty rags knitted themselves together, became rich velvets and furs once more, the leather of his belt and boots returned to looking new and supple.
Appearance only. This was illusion, the one he so carefully and constantly maintained, and now I understood why. The realization of what I was watching slowly began to dawn upon me.
Azalin was a lich, a thrice-damned lien.
My first overpowering impulse was to destroy the thing. It was a threat far greater than any I had ever faced before, but I knew I was not even remotely prepared to attempt such a task. Had I been fully versed with my most powerful spells and weapons I might have had a chance against him, perhaps. But he was rapidly regaining full consciousness, and my next action would likely dictate whether I lived or died. My second impulse was for immediate self-preservation. I quietly lay back down and shut my eyes.
It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, to lie there apparently stunned while not ten feet away what was now my worst enemy stirred itself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I had to make a conscious effort to remain absolutely still. Keeping every muscle utterly relaxed under the present circumstances required an astonishing amount of willpower when every instinct screamed at me to move. It was a true battle between reflex and resolution, and though precious instinct had saved me often in the past, this time I must not give in to basic impulse.
I managed to hold quite still, inspired by the knowledge that if Azalin found out my deception he would instantly understand that I'd discovered his great secret. And that would be very bad for me.
I heard more sounds from his area of the chamber, the brush of his bones against the stone floor, a ghostly groan. Whether it was an expression of physical or mental distress, I couldn't tell. Could such creatures feel bodily pain in the same sense as other beings? Never before having encountered such a powerful being, I did not know.
After a few moments, I stirred and moaned and let my eyes flutter open in what I hoped would seem a normal manner. Now did I allow myself to look around, doing my best to recreate my initial reaction to the destruction, being careful not to overplay things. When my gaze fell upon Azalin, he was already getting to his feet.
His illusion was firmly in place; he looked the same as ever, except for his gloves, which were gone. Probably torn or burned from his withered hands when-
Stop that right now.
If I started making mental comparisons between the illusion and what I knew to be reality, it would affect my behavior and be a giveaway to him. In all our time together, in all the recollections he'd passed to me, he hadn't once dropped the least hint of his true self, and quite wisely. Had I known, I would never have given him my shelter and protection and would have done my utmost to destroy him.
Perhaps I wasn't animate in the same way as others, but I did retain a spark of true passion within me, and that made me a closer, more willing ally to the living than to this creature. Final death could still ultimately claim one such as myself, but a lich was already dead, a collection of bones existent by the foulest kind of dark magic and its own monumental determination to dwell beyond its normal span of years.
While I still supped with pleasure from life's table, still held my place as a predator in the workings of the world, not so for a lich, who had given up all such pleasures, embracing and at the same time defying death itself for continuance, empty continuance. The cold revulsion Azalin inspired in all who came near him was quite justified.
With all my contact with him I had grown used to that kind of cold, successfully ignoring it. The reaction I had now was not aversion to his physical form so much as the fact that when it came to magic, he as a lich was more than powerful enough to challenge me and win. Indeed, the only thing holding him back from such conquest must have been our bargain, the necessity of our having to work together. That could change, though. It might have changed already with this catastrophic failure. I had to play this out very carefully and not provide him with the least suspicion that his secret was no more, that I had realized my terrible vulnerability to him. His pretense must continue.
Barovia was little enough, but all I had. It was also my only hope of seeing Tatyana live again. To save her, to save that which was mine, I would do anything, even take on the perilous task of trying to destroy Azalin.
But I dared not surrender to that impulse just yet. This was not the time. Even had I been rested and ready for just such a confrontation, i still would have been hard pressed to overcome a being with Azalin's power.
I stood-my limbs surprisingly steady after what I'd been through and what I was currently dealing with- and surveyed the damaged chamber with him. To continue the pretense that I was still ignorant of the truth I had to react as I would normally, which would be easy enough to emulate, for it was already boiling up inside.
I fastened him with a stony gaze, trying to suppress my rising rage. 'What went wrong?' I whispered.
