“Did I mention that I couldn’t move a muscle? I tried to fight back, of course, but every defense, counter-spell, or neutralizer I thought of was squelched before it could even form. The thing had clamped such a lock on me, it was all I could do to even string two thoughts together. Seemed to go on forever even though not very much time had elapsed - less than a few seconds external - but you know how perception plays tricks when you’re in that type of situation.
“Still, there was something strange about it, I mean something even stranger than the rest of it. I was aware that something was missing. You know how, even under the strongest attack, you always get some glimpse of the consciousness on the other end? Backscatter, or whatever? Well, this time there was nothing. It absolutely felt like there was nobody on the other end, nobody there at all, and never had been.
“Okay, so maybe they’d left a monitor trap, fine, you run into them sometimes, but they have tradeoffs. The heftier they are, the more difficult it is to hide them. The more you invest in them the more it takes out of you. And the more powerful they are, generally speaking, the more powerful you have to be to be able to charge them up.
“So there I was, caught in the most humongous thing of its kind I’d ever heard of, wondering who could have built it and having the sinking feeling they were on the way to see what their trap had reeled in. But they weren’t.”
Karlini stared at his glass of water. “Don’t we have anything more interesting than this clear stuff?” he said.
“You’ve had quite enough of the hard stuff lately, dear,” said Roni.
“Are you sure you’re on my side?” Karlini muttered under his breath. “Oh, all right. So these ectoplasm-style tendrils start to get shimmery, fall in on themselves, and go out, and patches of the field started to relax, and I discover all of a sudden that what was holding me up isn’t holding me up any more, I’m jerking in every direction, and while I’m falling down I’m seeing the last tendrils slide off into the flagstones. The rest of the field floats away and dissipates. My aura, by this point, was the shabbiest thing you’ve ever seen, tatters and holes and rips all through it, and I sure didn’t have the energy to try to restore it. An aura may not be the person, as Iskendarian claimed, but at the very least it’s reflective of the person’s state. I felt like my aura looked. All I could do was lie there and try to breathe.
“Then I heard a noise out on the roadbed on the other side of the portcullis. Roni, disregarding my explicit instructions, had come up the rope after me. I opened my mouth to tell her to stay away, but before I could say a word she was over the edge of the drop and heading for the entrance. Of course, I shouldn’t have worried, Roni’s the smartest person I know. She stopped outside the gate.”
“Well, he didn’t look quite ready to die,” Roni said, “at least not at that moment, so I didn’t want to take the chance that running after him would call down the same attack on me.”
“I got myself rolled over and kind of staggered toward the exit,” Karlini said. “I suppose you could say I made it. My body made it, anyway. Just as I crossed the plane of the portcullis I felt a terrible pain in my chest, like it was being crushed by a giant foot. I started to pass out. Roni grabbed me as I started to keel over backward -”
“He was also turning a fairly remarkable blue color,” she said.
“- and we both fell back inside the gateway.
“Two things happened, or rather one thing happened and one thing didn’t. The thing that happened was that the pain in my chest went away. The other thing was Roni - nothing happened to her. Nothing attacked. The monitor spell didn’t appear.”
“It wasn’t a permanent guardian,” Max said, “it was a one-shot.”
“Right,” said Karlini, “and I’d sprung it.
“Roni and I sat there for awhile. When I could stand again we started to explore the place, see if there was any other way out. We didn’t find anything. The spell that had snagged me was the only trap we could see, but that spell had bound me to the airspace of the castle. Whenever I tried to leave my heart stopped. It wasn’t only through that first doorway, it was flying, climbing over the wall, teleporting, every possible way of getting away I could think of. Obviously, I wasn’t supposed to leave. Wasn’t isn’t the word. I’m still not supposed to leave.”
“However you had entered the castle,” Max said, “you would have activated the monitor. It didn’t care where you came in, it only cared that someone had come in.”
“That’s what we think too, Max. I also suspect the monitor was looking for the right kind of person, somebody with the right level of magical expertise. That’s the reason for all that intensive scanning and probing I went through; it was checking me out to see if I was qualified. I suspect that especially because of what happened later.”
“There had to be more,” Max said.
Karlini squinted at him. “Of course there’s more. Well. Roni and the rest could come and go at will, but I was stuck in here. The next thing I knew, they had all decided to move in with me. They carted over all the laboratory equipment and most of the library, and a whole pile of other stuff. The castle had plenty of food, so we weren’t about to starve. It also had some inhabitants of its own, like the big bird you rode in on. What it didn’t seem to have was a clue to what was going on.
“Then on the third day I was upstairs in one of the towers, searching an area I hadn’t visited before. I had been climbing a circular staircase that wound around the core of the tower, with rooms on each level opening off a landing. Most of the rooms were locked behind these solid wood doors cross bound with iron plates, and I hadn’t run across the keys yet, so mostly I’d been slogging up and down the stairs, looking for secret passages and suchlike. I was thinking about sitting down to rest for a moment when I came around the corner to the next landing, high up in the tower. The door off the landing was hanging open. I mean it wasn’t merely open, it was hanging there, dangling at an angle from the top hinge, scorched and gouged and pretty well bashed in. All the surfaces in that area were scorched as well - wall, ceilings, floor. An outline of burnt soot against one wall showed the form of a tapestry that had been flash-fried. I -”
“Was there a smell?” Max said.
“Yes, there was, it was a burnt odor, but the smell wasn’t fresh; say at least a week or two old, it wasn’t an illusion. Anyway, through the broken door I could see an office. As I climbed past the door, though, I suddenly realized that I had gotten sleepy, very sleepy, in fact so sleepy that I felt my eyelids dropping closed and found myself starting to snore. Without even knowing it I must have fallen to the floor, because that’s where I was later, but that wasn’t on my mind at the moment since I had slipped smoothly into a dream.