With the cats pacing beside them they looked in one room after another on the upper level but found nothing to furnish them with a clue as to the identity of the screamer, or the whereabouts of Miathan and Eliseth.
“This is ridiculous,” Forral said at last. “We’re just wasting our time—freezing to death for nothing. It can’t be much further down, or these big beasties wouldn’t have heard it. I don’t know what you expected to find down here, but. . .”
“Whoever screamed, of course,” Aurian retorted sharply. “And what made them do it.”
“Are you absolutely sure the cats heard something?” Forral insisted. “I’m sure they must have been mistaken—it would have taken a pretty loud scream to penetrate through all this stone. We may as well go back, if you ask me,” he urged. It was plain that the swordsman didn’t like the place. Aurian saw him fingering the hilt of Anvar’s sword, which he had found in Miathan’s chambers.—The Mage, however, had grown used to trusting her instincts, and something still prompted her to persist with the search. “Let’s go on just a little further,” she insisted. “If Shia says she heard screaming she did—and it didn’t come out of nowhere. There’s something close by that we need to find—don’t ask me why, but I’m sure of it.”
Forral looked thoroughly unimpressed by this reasoning—or lack of it.
“Aurian—will you come on bock ...” He grabbed her hand, tugging her with him, but dropped it when Shia gave a warning growl.
“It’s nearby, I’m sure. Somehow I have the feeling . . .” With Forral trailing reluctantly behind her, the Mage opened the next door.
It was the last thing she had expected to see. Aurian cried out in shock and her Magelight went out, plunging the chamber into merciful darkness. With a stifled oath, Forral yanked her back into the corridor and slammed the door behind him. “Get away from there, you idiot! Move!” Groping in the darkness, he grabbed her tunic and began to pull.
Aurian resisted his tugging and leant back against the cold stone wall, gasping for breath. Unable to stop herself, she began to laugh weakly.
“Curse you, Aurian, there’s no time for this!” Forral yelled at her. “That room is full of bloody Nihilim!”
“Forral—it’s all right.” At last Aurian managed to get hold of herself. “The Wraiths can’t hurt us. When my Magelight went out I saw the glimmer of a time spell. They must be the Nihilim that Finbarr took out of time to save me.” She laid a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Forral. It must have been a horrible shock for you, seeing them like that.”
In the dark there was a small silence from Forral, then: “Bugger it,” he muttered. “I feel stupid now.”
“You’re not the only one,” Aurian admitted. “They had me fooled at first.” She pulled herself together and kindled a new light to hover above them. “For a minute there, when I first opened the door and saw them, I thought my heart was going to stop.” She was about to put her arms around him, but when she looked up into Anvar’s face, something seemed to shrivel inside her and she turned away hastily. “Come on,” she said softly. “Let’s get away from here.—The Wraiths may be immobilized and if they’ve been here all this time they must be harmless, but you can never know for certain how long a time spell is going to last. Besides, they make my flesh creep.”
Forral nodded. “That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said since we came down here.”
Shia had nosed the door ajar once more, and was peering curiously at the Wraiths through the narrow gap. “So those are the creatures that haunt your nightmares,” she said to Aurian. Her tones held a slight edge of puzzlement.
“Take my word for it, they’re considerably more terrifying, not to mention gruesome, when they can move—and feed,” the Mage assured her.
They were just turning away to retrace their steps when the voice came.—Aurian stopped dead. “Can you hear that?” she demanded. “What is it... ?”
The swordsman looked puzzled. “Hear what?”
They turned to one another in consternation. “Something that only communicates with Magefolk, apparently,” Aurian whispered.
Forral’s hand went to the hilt of his sword. The Mage gave him a chance to draw it and then, as the echoes of the steely slither had died away, she held up her hand for silence. But when she listened, no sound disturbed the silence save that of their own breath.
“Can you hear that, Shia, Khanu?” Aurian asked hopefully.
“I’m sorry,” Shia told her. “I can’t hear anything but us.”
“Nor I,” Khanu added.
The voice, however, had not ceased. The Mage could still hear it in her head—a thin, cold, high-pitched call. It had no discernible words, but nonetheless it was clearly a beseeching, a beckoning, a summoning. Aurian felt a shiver go through her. “It wants us,” she murmured. “It wants us to follow.”
“What? You have got to be joking!”
“No, truly,” Aurian insisted. “The Gods only know what it is, but it can’t be a Wraith, or it would certainly have found a way to free its comrades by now.—Besides, if it was something that meant to harm us, why didn’t it attack when we were helpless in the dark? That would have been the obvious time.”
“You’d better be right,” Forral retorted, “because you’ll be staking our lives on that quaint notion.”
Aurian scarcely heard him. Already, she was setting off down the passage, in pursuit of the phantom call. She was barely aware that the others followed reluctantly, Forral muttering darkly under his breath.
The Mage crept on down the passage following the irresistible murmur of the summons, which did not waver or vary in tone unless she attempted to stop or turn aside into one of the chambers that lined the corridor. If she went the wrong way, the incomprehensible whisper turned into a screeching whine that made Aurian’s head throb as though it were about to burst. The same thing happened when she tried to turn back. Soon, she had no other choice but to continue.
Aurian could tell that Forral was worried. His—Anvar’s—face, starkly illuminated by the pale Magelight, looked sickly and wan, his dark eyes shaded to fathomless voids. “Aurian, will you stop this?” he hissed.
The Mage shook her head. “I’m sorry, Forral—I can’t. It’s too late now—if I don’t follow, the voice will drive me mad.”
It was easy enough to find the right chamber—Aurian only had to follow the luring call that whispered, with increasing urgency now, in the recesses of her mind. Forgetting all caution, she hurried along, drawn by the summoner’s spell, ignoring Forral’s increasingly frantic attempts to slow her down. Her Magelight streamed behind her, trailing a comet tail of sparks. The voice was still whispering, louder and more urgently than ever. Though Aurian could not have said how she could tell, the summons seemed to emanate from a doorway farther along on the right. Dragging Forral along behind her, she rushed toward the open door—and as soon as she laid a hand on it, the voice abruptly ceased.
“I can’t hear it anymore,” she said softly. “But it’s here—I know it is.—Whatever was calling me, is in this room.”
As the door swung open it broke Grince’s terrified trance. He whirled around—and felt his guts shrivel. There in the doorway stood a pair of what could only be Mages—tall, intimidating, and with silver eyes that seemed to pierce the thief’s very soul.
After the first moment of startled confrontation with the tall, red-haired Magewoman, her grim companion, and the fearsome, clawed, fanged black monsters—plainly magical demons or something of the like—Grince had no other recourse save to throw himself to the floor and plead for his life. The Academy was not deserted after all—and he had been caught trespassing in it!—As he lay there, not daring to raise his head and waiting for some terrible fate to strike him down, a whole lifetime seemed to pass.