chamber into which he’d fallen. It was a large hall with a dozen or more thick columns, the ceiling a good twenty feet or more overhead. An old slide had ruined the far end of the chamber, leaving a wall of rubble. Some sort of temple? Geran guessed. Or perhaps a trophy room or banquet hall? It seemed strange that any of those things might be located in a cellar, but maybe the ancient catastrophe that had destroyed Sulasspryn had caused some sort of collapse here.
The only stairs he could see were choked with rubble, so Geran held up his light and studied the hole in the ceiling through which he’d fallen. He certainly couldn’t climb back up that way, not with his bad wrist and bad knee. But he didn’t necessarily have to climb. He picked out a spot in the room above, gathered his concentration, and spoke a single arcane syllable:
The teleport spell whisked him through an instant of icy blackness, and then he was in the chamber above. He missed his footing, stumbled, and fell, wrenching his knee again-he hadn’t been able to see exactly where he was going to appear from the chamber below, and he’d picked a spot where the wreckage of old furniture littered the ground. Rain drummed down in the street outside, and scores of leaks in the roof of the old palace or temple allowed steady streams of rainwater to pour inside. That must have been the source of the water standing in the cellar below, he realized. Quickly he covered up his light again, leaving just a tiny glimmer peeking between his fingers as he stood and hobbled to the archway to peer up and down the street.
It seemed abandoned, but it was hard to be certain; the night was black, cold rain fell in sheets on the old cobblestones and broken tiles, and the wind blew in short, stiff gusts that rustled the trees and rushed through the wiry grass growing up between the ancient walls. A whole flock of gargoyles could have been standing in the street thirty yards away, and Geran wouldn’t have known it. He decided to risk a little more light, and let more of the illumination show from the stone he held. Sulasspryn in its day had been much like old Hulburg, a small city huddled around a good harbor on the north shore of the Moonsea. Most of the old buildings were made of well-dressed stone, with slate tiles for roofing and broad avenues of mortared flagstones. Unlike Hulburg, it had never been rebuilt after its collapse; no one had ever come to clear the streets of rubble, cannibalize stone from old buildings, or build atop the ruins. If the Hulmasters had never resettled in Hulburg, this is what Hulburg would have looked like, Geran thought.
He limped across the street to the place where the gargoyle had dropped him, and found the cedar tree he’d fallen through. He searched beneath its boughs for a long time, shivering in the cold and the wet, and found nothing. He allowed the light to shine brighter still and peered into the branches, wondering if the satchel had been caught somewhere higher up, but it was not there either. “Think, Geran,” he growled. “Where did you drop it?”
He tried to recall those last dizzy moments of the fight by the beach. The gargoyle had seized him in its talons, struggling to carry him aloft. He remembered the bluffs overlooking the harbor passing under his feet in a wild whirl, then the first few buildings by the edge, looking down and seeing the satchel fall toward the ruins below. The gargoyle had kept flying inland, toward the ruined citadel in the heart of the city, carrying him along. If he had to guess, the satchel was somewhere between the edge of the bluff and the place where he’d fallen, probably not more than a hundred yards from where he stood.
Closing his eyes, he whispered the words of a minor charm intended to reveal the presence of magic nearby. He felt nothing, but that didn’t surprise him. He would have to be close to the starry compass in order to detect its enchantment in that way. Unfortunately, he had no other method for locating the compass besides groping through the rain and darkness in the hopes that he might physically stumble over it. The best thing to do would be to retrace the gargoyle’s dizzying flight over the ruins as best he could, stopping frequently to repeat the minor divination. But even that would be nearly impossible, because he wasn’t sure exactly which way he’d come before, and even if he were, he couldn’t cut directly over the intervening ground. He’d have to find avenues that led back in the way he wanted to go without diverting him too far from the gargoyle’s path.
“Or would it be wiser to remain here and wait for a rescue party?” he muttered to himself. He had no idea if
He spent an agonizing hour groping his way through the streets, slowly working his way back toward the harbor. He blundered into blind alleys, climbed painfully over the rubble of ruined buildings, and backtracked dozens of times to try to stay as close as he could to his guess at the straight-line path back toward the harbor. Every fifty steps or so he paused to repeat the charm, hoping for some faint glimmer in the darkness. Several times he heard things moving in the ruins around him-the grating sound of rubble shifting, distant croaking cries that echoed from the stones, and one time the sudden flurry of heavy wingbeats somewhere overhead. For that one, Geran froze where he stood, not daring to move or make a sound until he was certain the creature was gone. But even after the wingbeats faded, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was lingering nearby, something that had his spoor and was patiently stalking him through the rain and the gloom. Icy tendrils of dread began to creep down his spine, and he hurried along as quickly as he could.
He turned a corner into a small, cluttered alleyway-likely a workshop district in Sulasspryn’s better days-and pressed himself into a doorway, straining eyes and ears to detect any motion in the night around him. Something was abroad in the darkness, of that he was sure, and he did not care to meet it. He waited for a short time, watching back the way he’d come, but he could see nothing but the faint glimmer of puddles in the street and the dim, jagged shadows that marked the rooftops of the ruined city. He murmured the words of his detection charm again, stretching out his senses for the peculiar psychic impressions of magic nearby … and this time he felt a distinct answer, a faint vibration like a harpstring plucked in a nearby room. He turned and stared, trying to discern exactly which direction he’d felt the enchantment from, and decided that it was down the alleyway and a little to one side, perhaps in one of the old houses along the lane or just behind them.
He turned to leave, and in the corner of his eye he glimpsed a dark shape slipping across the street behind him. The air grew colder, and Geran jerked his head back, afraid he might have been seen. Best to move on while it’s not in sight, he told himself. Quickly he hurried down the alleyway, moving toward the place where he’d felt the glimmer of enchantment. It still hovered at the edge of his awareness, and he fumbled toward it as he slipped and stumbled through the rubble. A doorway loomed up to his left; he cautiously stepped through, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other cupped around his light-pebble.
The roof of this small home had fallen in long ago and was now an overgrown mound of rubble in the center of the floor. Rain spattered down from the open sky-and there, half hidden in the underbrush by one wall, the leather satchel gleamed wetly. Geran crossed the room and picked it up. It felt full, but to be certain he undid the latch and reached in. The fall might have damaged the orb, after all … but smooth, unbroken crystal met his fingers. He pulled out the starry compass and quickly examined it. In the darkness the tiny pinpricks of white light embedded in its substance seemed to glow faintly. He sighed in relief and put the magical device back into the satchel.
With the compass in hand, now he was free to find his way out of the city by the most direct route available. He hurried back to the alleyway outside and turned left, hoping that the next big street might lead him toward the bluffs overlooking the harbor. If he remembered rightly, there were old stairways zigzagging down from the street- ends to the strand below.
Something was waiting for him in the street.
He froze in midstep as he emerged from the alleyway, aware of a presence-several presences-gathered in the shadows outside. Again, cold dread welled up in his heart, stealing his voice. He heard the creature this time, a thick wet gurgling sound that wheezed in the darkness. And then that sound shaped itself into words and spoke. “Geran Hulmaster,” it bubbled. “Geran Hulmaster.”
Geran recoiled several steps, until he sensed another one close behind him. He swept out his sword and turned in a circle, trying to menace all the things around him with its deadly point. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was look upon the creatures closing in on him … but he needed some light to fight by. He opened his hand and held high the stone with the light spell. Blue-white radiance flared brightly in the shadowed street, revealing the leaning cornices and cracked facades of the ruins around him.
The dwarf Murkelmor crouched before him. At first Geran thought he was wearing some kind of strange, tattered cape, but then he realized that the flesh of Murkelmor’s chest and shoulders had been ripped to ribbons.
