vremyonni- though many of those scrolls and maps had been stolen less than a tenday previous. Syrolf had noted their theft among Bastun's list of crimes, but truly he had no need to steal them. Keffrass had been one of the first to examine Shandaular and the Shield and had taught Bastun as much as he had wanted to learn.
He wished Keffrass were here now, though were that possible Bastun would have had no reason to come-at least, not as soon perhaps. The Shield had its secrets, secrets Keffrass had long protected and only after many years had passed on to Bastun.
The night of the theft and the murder seemed a lifetime away.
The fog thickened and progress slowed. Runners moved back and forth between Thaena and the lead warriors, taking directions and making reports. 'Strange movement in the fog,' they reported, and at least one scout's face was as white as the snow when she spoke with Duras. Bastun closed his eyes briefly and whispered a word of command, activating magic embedded in his mask to witness any manipulation of the Weave in the vicinity. When he opened his eyes again he gasped.
A ripple of energy flowed around them, swirling with the fog and forming into shapes that glowed dully with magic. Faces and dim silhouettes streamed past them, crowds of spirits rushing along in a silent drama. As Bastun maintained the spell, the visions grew more intense. Dull colors of blue and black trailed behind the spirits as they appeared beside him and ran through those in front of him. He could make out a whisper of sound, snippets of an ancient language in a dialect he did not understand, and faint screams of anguish echoed in his ears as if from far away. The ghosts of fallen Shandaular.
Once again, as before when they'd first made landfall, Bastun detected a strange pattern in the sounds. Something was missing, like hearing only one side of a conversation or every other note of a familiar song. He focused on the gaps, trying to fill in what could have been taken away, but to no avail. Letting the spell fade, he shook his head as the mundane world returned in the glimmer of distant torches and tumbling snowflakes. Narrowing his eyes, he tried to make out those spirits in normal sight, but they were invisible. Their mystery troubled him-the ghosts of Shandaular weren't a topic the scrolls detailed. They had been either overlooked, or it was something new.
A Rashemi runner came again, and the ethran raised her hand and called for a stop. After consulting with Thaena he returned to the front. Anilya stopped her own band and stood by while Thaena spoke with Duras.
'There is a large structure up ahead and what looks to be a clear road to the Shield's gates,' she told the warrior. 'We should scout for any threats before approaching the castle.'
'Agreed,' Duras said, and motioned towards Bastun. 'Syrolf! You're with me.'
Bastun let out the breath he'd almost replied with and watched as Syrolf reluctantly turned over his guard to the other warriors. The pair disappeared into the fog.
Anilya conferred with Ohriman, drawing a cautious stare from Bastun. Thaena stood on the north side of the road at the base of a ruined wall, and the vremyonni saw his chance to speak with her about his concerns. Glancing at the others, he made his way in as non-threatening a manner as he could manage. He was watched carefully but not stopped by his guards-their distaste for him apparently not as motivated as SyrolFs.
'Ethran,' he said, 'may I have a word?'
She nodded, but her eyes remained on the curving path ahead where Duras had gone. Bastun leaned against the wall beside Thaena, choosing his words carefully before speaking. Secrets and difficult subjects seemed to be gathering in crowds since they'd arrived in Shandaular, and words were only complicating matters further.
'I wanted to speak of Anilya,' he said. 'Her presence here-'
'Is a threat?' she replied, then looked at him. 'Yes. I am aware of the threats that surround me.'
He read her meaningful glance and decided to push the subject further and gauge her response. There was power in knowledge, and he needed to know how much power she had.
'And the Shield?' he asked.
'The Shield? Do you consider the Shield itself a threat?'
'That depends,' he answered, though his thoughts swirled with the answer she had truly given him: that she did not know the secrets of Shandaular-and that he was far more alone than he suspected. Looking at her he wondered what her memory of him had become. 'Am I to be executed when we reach the Shield?'
For the briefest of moments he saw a glimmer of softness in the eyes behind her mask, a hint of caring that made him feel human again, but she looked away. The hardness in her voice betrayed the glance when she answered.
'The othlor have not passed any sentence upon you,' she said. 'This journey-this final journey-was at your request. The only danger you face, that any of us face, is the Nar and whatever they hope to accomplish here.'
'And the durthan,' Bastun said, motioning toward Anilya and Ohriman.
'Yes. The durthan as well,' she said quietly, studying the woman who would have been her sworn enemy under normal circumstances.
Bastun took a breath and said directly what she had not. 'And me.'
She made no show that she had heard him at all. Her eyes remained fixed on Anilya until the durthan returned the stare, then Thaena looked down and returned to her watch for Duras.
'Yes,' she finally whispered. 'You too.'
Time crawled as they waited for the scouts to return. The wind picked up, stirring the falling snow into a dance of whirling particles in the torchlight. Anilya stood impatiently across the road, looking between Thaena and the direction of the Rashemi scouts. Her warriors grumbled and paced, bundled in heavy cloaks. Ohriman sat crouched in the snow, wearing only his light armor and plain clothing beneath. He did not shiver or show any sign that the chill affected him. He made even the stoic Rashemi look frozen by comparison. Smirking, he winked a catlike eye at Bastun and rubbed quickly melting snow between his bare hands.
Bastun had met with and studied beings that had been touched by fiendish blood, commonly called tieflings. Ohriman's ancestry was intriguing in a scholarly sense, but something in the sellsword's eye, the tiny glint of nearby torches, a gleam of cruelty or amusement-or both-troubled Bastun deeply.
Unflinching under Ohriman's scrutiny, Bastun almost missed the faint sound of voices hiding in the wind. Listening carefully, he made out speakers, distant and indiscernible, but different than those of the city's spirits. In a pause between gusts, the faint ringing of steel on steel clattered and echoed down the path. Both groups stopped their pacing and conversations, taking in the noise and looking to Thaena. The ethran's reaction was swift and decisive.
'Quickly! Move!' she shouted, a command echoed by Anilya to her own troop.
The fang surged forward into the mist, followed by the sellswords. Thaena, Bastun, and Anilya fell in behind the warriors, running sure-footed through the snow. The voices and sounds of battle grew louder as they wound through the ruins, echoing as if from a cavern. Voices of pain and anguish mingled with those sounds, cries of suffering unlike anything Bastun had ever heard before. Turning a wide corner, the edges of a large circle of destroyed buildings came into view, and he surmised their location with dawning horror.
Here in the center of Shandaular, down curving stairways to a blackened stone square, lay the origins of the entire city and the reason for its destruction-the Hall of the Portal. They ran down the steps, eyeing the fallen columns and piles of rubble that lined the curved walls of the Hall. Bastun had studied the vague references about what lay inside-and the warnings about approaching the site after sunset. Flickering light painted the stone in shades of blue and green. Dancing shadows on the wall followed the forms of Duras, Syrolf, and the warriors they led as well as the gruesome shapes of their foes.
Clawlike hands scratched and tore at the Rashemi, batting away their swords and hurling grown men through the air to crash against the walls. Eyes that were little more than black pools of viscous, dripping tears dominated their sunken faces. Armor hung loosely on their bodies, rusted and split by time. Their age-worn tabards bore the faded insignia of the Nentyarch of Dun-Tharos, the first ruler of ancient Narfell-a black tree, stripped of leaves on a circular red field-soldiers cursed to suffer alongside the people they slaughtered as the city burned and the Shield was breached.
The creatures wailed and cried with monstrous voices. Only a dozen opposed the fang, but their inhuman strength more than made up for their numbers.
The fang negotiated the cracked and rubble-strewn floors without hesitation, roaring eagerly into battle against foes thankfully more substantial than the city's spirits. Anilya's sellswords paled at the sight of the enemy, overtaken by the wracking sobs and groans that echoed within the hall. Several of the sellswords fell to their knees and rolled on their sides, clutching their ears and weeping uncontrollably. The others, led by Ohriman, followed the
