Talal tugged on her arm. Absorbed in her thoughts, Meisha hadn't noticed when they'd stopped. Framed by a pearly, flow-stone waterfall, Talal pointed behind her to a stretch of wall. Meisha turned and blinked.
Numbers covered the stone from floor to ceiling, arranged in neatly ordered columns like a moneylender's account. All were dates, marked with the change of month and the change of year. They ended Marpenoth 3 of 1374 DR.
"Iadra marks a new one every day," said Talal.
"1370," Meisha read from the top of the first column. "Eleasias 20. Four years ago."
"Date we found the entrance. Wish we hadn't," Talal muttered.
"You—all of you?" Meisha shook her head. "Impossible. Varan shields the entrance with magic and places a ward on the perimeter."
A shadow passed over the boy's face. "There was no magic. The way was just sitting there, open as you please. We wouldn't have gone in, but the brigands had started to circle. There were too many of us not to be noticed out in the open."
"What were you doing all the way out here?"
"Running," Talal said.
Meisha waved an impatient hand. "From brigands, yes, but what—"
"No—from Esmeltaran."
"Esmeltaran?" Meisha echoed. Then it hit her: 1370. Meisha didn't need to do the calculation. She knew. "The ogres," she said, and Talal nodded. "You're refugees from the war."
"We were headed for Keczulla when they started shadowing us."
"The men from the portal?" Meisha asked.
Talal actually laughed. "No, the brigands—soft bellies by comparison. There were a lot more of us then. We moved in a group, tight as Tyr's arse. Only thing kept us alive—they didn't want to take on the whole bunch of us. But they smartened up, the longer they stayed with us. Picked off the stragglers, set traps—that sort of thing. We never saw any of the cowardly bastards. Thought we could wait them out in the caves. We should've known something was wrong if damn brigands wouldn't follow us inside."
"Did you explore? Was there anyone living in the caves?" Meisha wanted to know.
Talal hesitated. He swung the torch at one of the alcoves.
Meisha went for the door, but the boy caught her wrist.
"Don't burst in like that!" he hissed. "You want to kill us all?"
"It's Varan, isn't it?" Meisha said. At his blank look, she pressed, "You found a wizard here."
Talal's lip curled. "Pity us, yes."
Meisha freed her arm. "He's the man I came to see—my teacher! He can get us all out of here."
The boy stared at her. "Certainly, Lady," he said, bowing her mockingly toward the door. "You go right on in and ask him to do that."
Dread welled inside Meisha, but she pushed past Talal. The door scraped the stone floor as she wrenched it open, dripping dirt and cold sediment down on her. She ignored it in the face of what lay within.
The room was littered with garbage. Broken bits of junk covered every available inch of floor space, like the aftermath of a child's tantrum. Varan sat in one corner of the squalid room, his back to her, arms moving as if in the midst of a complicated spell. Small, white maggots swarmed over an uneaten plate of meat and bread on the floor next to him.
Meisha slowly circled the rear wall, putting herself in the wizard's periphery so he would know she was there. Varan held an object in his hands, an opaque sphere caged in a knot of iron bands. Within the sphere, tiny lights winked and danced like trapped stars. Wherever Varan touched the bands, the lights would gather, drawn zipping across the empty space to swirl around his fingertips. The collected magic in the room was so intense it hurt Meisha's head to concentrate too closely on any one point. And the Art did not issue only from the sphere.
Meisha uttered a quick word and swept a fanning gesture the length and width of the room. As the spell took effect, the light nearly smote her blind. Most of the intact objects on the floor, with the exception of the food, contained magic—slight in some instances, dangerously strong in others.
"Varan, what have you been doing?" Meisha whispered, but no one answered. She glanced behind her, but Talal had not followed her into the room. He stood, framed in the crack of the half-closed door, watching Varan. His expression showed a mixture of hatred, awe, and fear.
Meisha took a step forward. She felt the boy make a restless motion. Her eyes shot a question at him, and a warning—don't try to stop me.
Talal appeared torn. Reluctantly, he stepped into the room, just far enough to whisper, "He won't answer you. He never talks to us."
"What's wrong with him?"
"Lady, you'd need a bucket full of scribes to make that list. Just come away," he pleaded.
Meisha shook her head. "I have to see him." She crept toward the wizard, carefully toeing aside the non-magical debris to make a path.
She knelt next to her former teacher, but he did not stir from his work. He smelled much worse than Talal. His gray-blue robes were stained—Mystra's mercy, in some places charred—and soiled by old urine and waste. Her eyes traveled upward, and Meisha gasped at the gaunt, cavernous husk that the wizard's face had become.
Varan had been aged when Meisha was young, but the man who sat before her was sucked dry, all his energy and vitality gone. His left eye was missing, and the flesh around the empty socket had melted, folding into itself like a pudding. His one good eye stared dully at the wall as his hands moved in a jerky rhythm over the sphere.
Meisha followed his gaze. A rough parchment drawing floated flat against the cavern wall, illuminated by green radiances. On it someone had scribbled—the hand was too spiky to be Varan's—a drawing of the sphere, with notes along the top and sides of the page.
The lights in the sphere flared, drawn to its center. Suddenly, a sound like shattering glass echoed in the room, and the lights went out. Gray mist tendrils flowed from the gaps in the iron bands, curling up sinuously to touch Varan's beard.
The wizard's hands shook, as if the sphere had suddenly doubled in weight. It dragged the old man's arms down, and the mist swirled and dissipated. The sphere hit the cavern floor with a thud that Meisha felt through her knees.
Distaste flickered in the wizard's eye. He pushed the sphere aside and tore the drawing from the wall.
"Broken."
Meisha's head snapped up at the sound of the wizard's voice. "Varan?"
"Hello, little firebird," he replied, but his gaze never left the drawing. Carefully, he tore it into strips of glowing green, flicking each aside like magical confetti.
Relief flooded Meisha at the sound of the old nickname. "Master. What happened to you, to your eye?"
Varan seemed not to hear her. "I broke another one." He selected a brittle piece of meat from the plate and tore off a bite.
"What do you mean, you 'broke' it?" Meisha asked.
"Broken," Varan repeated. "Some of them work, some break. And yet they cling to me, just like you did, firebird. Cling to me, wanting to be fixed. I suppose I'll fix them all, eventually."
"Varan," Meisha said, choking back her revulsion at the white, squirming maggots crawling in the hair around the wizard's lips, "where is Jonal? And Prieces—the other apprentices? Why didn't they aid you?"
"Oh, they're here," Varan said. He patted the small sack he wore tied around his neck. He reached inside and drew out three rings. He dropped them into her cupped hand one at a time. They were identical to the ring Meisha wore, but for the bloodstains.