Aeron had thought the room silent, but now he became aware of a crackling, snapping sound as violet energy whirled and darted in a sickly aura around the rune-marked ring. The roaring deafened him, but now he heard clearly the mindless yammering, the moans and shrieks, the insane howls of the mages who stood transfixed by Oriseus's will and the sinister font of energy. How could I not have sensed this? he thought. How could I have been so blind?
"Again you are last, Aeron," Oriseus called, voice clear and strong above the din. "Join us. You are part of our circle now."
Stark terror jolted Aeron into action at Oriseus's words. He took two steps back, not in defiance, but in weakness. "No," he whispered, horrified. "No."
Oriseus smirked, confident of his victory. "You wanted power, Aeron. You left your home behind to come to the college. You desired the strength to shield yourself from harm, to strike down your enemies. Well, here it is. Stand with me and you will carve your name on the heart of the world. None will stand against you. None!"
"This isn't what I wanted," Aeron said in a small voice.
Oriseus snorted. "You've wanted this all your life, boy. More than anything, you want to be the one people fear. Come .. . you are damned already." The conjuror raised his hand, and Aeron felt his feet slog forward, dragging him toward the stone's fatal embrace. In horror, he tried to will his feet to stop, but his body refused to obey.
In blind panic, Aeron reached into the recesses of his memory and seized a spell of translocation, a spell he'd barely grasped just a few short days ago. In the daylight world, under perfect conditions, it strained his abilities to the utmost to work the enchantment. Here, it was completely beyond his skill. But desperation lent him the strength to gasp out the words that keyed the spell, and in his mind, he unfettered the complex sigil that defined its form.
His own life-force was the merest fraction of the power the dimension leap required. Yet there was no Weave to work the spell. The stones were cold and lifeless, the air still and dead. The only power Aeron could tap was the dark inferno before him, and in his terror, he seized it and channeled it before he realized what he was doing. The dark energy seared him with a cold taint; he gagged in revulsion, as if grave dirt had been shoved beneath his skin. It sank frigid fingers into his belly and knotted under his ribs, drowning him in madness even as the chamber whirled away in shadow and mist.
Aeron caught one last glimpse of Master Oriseus's startled face as his spell wrenched him out of the Shadow Stone's chamber and hurled him through the vast, lightless void between the worlds. The darkness wormed its way through his veins, creeping into his heart with tendrils of cold fire. Unable to withstand another moment of the venomous assault, Aeron's mind slipped into the shadows and reeled away into the night.
Eleven
Cold, wet dirt fouled his mouth.
Aeron gagged and coughed, weakly scraping the back of one sleeve across his face. He was lying with his face pressed into mist-wreathed earth. The lightless dusk of the shadow plane surrounded him still, and he shuddered uncontrollably as his body reminded him of the numbing cold. When he'd first stepped through the silver door, the chill air had sapped the heat from his feet and hands, searing his nose with each breath. Now the center of his chest ached with a dull leaden pain, as if the blood in his heart was starting to freeze. Aeron groaned and tried to push himself upright, his limbs shaking with fatigue.
He was at the bottom of a steep hill, lying in a patch of soft ground where a noisome trickle of dark water carved a bitter rill at the foot of the slope. Dead gray grass grew in wiry tufts, broken by forbidding thickets of black briars and stands of sere, leafless trees. At first his mind was as blank as slate, devoid of any thought except a cognition of his surroundings, but like a candle guttering in the wind, his faculties began to return. Where am I? he wondered. How did I get here? Awkwardly Aeron gained his feet and staggered a few steps, struggling to wring motion from his hollow frame.
I'm still in the shadow land, but the pyramid isn't in sight, he thought. He'd been standing in the chamber of the stone, the last of Oriseus's circle to resist its influence . . . and then he'd worked a spell to escape. He felt he'd traveled a very long way indeed. Apparently his spell had worked, only not in the way he'd intended.
That led to the next obvious question: Where was he now? Aeron frowned, thinking. He was not anywhere near Cimbar's harbor or the place in the shadow plane that corresponded to the city's location. The lay of the land was wrong. But he could be a few miles inland, or hundreds of miles away. Or it might not make any difference, since he stood in the shadow plane. He'd heard that time and distance were distorted here.
"Of course," he muttered to himself. He knew a minor divination that would pinpoint his location. Absently he unlocked the spell's symbol in his mind, reaching for the spark of power within his own heart to give it life. The land and air around him were cold and dead, devoid of the Weave. He touched the merest flicker of his own life and spoke the spell.
A dark, coiling veil seemed to shift and slither in his heart. It was as if a black, hungry worm crawled through his thoughts, rasping against the inside of his skull, pulling at the substance of his mind like a piece of bone dragged through mud. Aeron clapped his hands to his head, reeled, and fell, gabbling in animal terror as the cold, slimy form extended thousands of needlelike bores throughout his body. Light and sanity fled as he shrieked in revulsion.
From a tiny island in the inchoate confusion of his shattered mind, Aeron realized that he'd felt the stone's influence again. In the tower, he'd touched the stone, drawn upon its power, and like a serpent, it had embedded its venom in his heart. Reaching for the Weave to work his divination had awakened the poison.
He became aware of a distant arrhythmic thumping sound and realized that he was listening to his heels drumming on the ground while the dispassionate stars wheeled over his head. After a time, the trembling seizure released him from its grip, but an icy fist remained clenched in the center of his chest.
In blank horror, Aeron stood and moved away with clumsy, jerking steps, a marionette driven by nothing more than a weak desire to flee. No strength or volition remained to him, but after a time, the dark rill and the bracken-covered hill faded into the gloom behind him, and he found himself following a worn and ancient track that cut through the brooding hills.
He walked until his legs gave out. After a time, his strength returned and he walked again. The road wandered, tunneling through dark woods filled with whispers and rustling sounds, though no wind blew. From time to time, he crossed ivy-grown bridges of cracked stone that spanned sluggish dark brooks, or passed watchful old ruins that slumbered on barren hilltops. The twilight never brightened or faded; it was impossible to say whether it was day or night.
He walked for a long time, determined to find something familiar, some sign of shelter or a way back to his own world, but the road wound through mile after mile of gray, barren hills and black thickets. The chill slowly permeated every portion of his body, knifing into his chest with each breath, deadening his face and limbs with the cold. He staggered and fell, picked himself up, then collapsed again. The dim twilight sapped his will with each step.
Can't give up, he told himself. There must be other doors, another way back. Aeron fixed his eyes on the distant hills, limned by the cold glimmer that served as the only source of illumination in this gray land. I'll find something there if I can just push on a little farther, he thought.