“You want to hide here?” Cael whispered.
“Are you afraid?” she asked in a voice cracking with fear.
“Not in the least,” he lied.
“Neither am I. Go ahead. Lead the way.”
Cael took a step forward, steeling himself for the next, and the next. His foot sank into the soft mould lying just beneath the eaves of the outer trees. It seemed he heard voices whispering, inviting and yet cold and harsh, promising both rest and torment. He summoned his courage and took another step, passing into the trees’ deepest shadows.
He pulled Alynthia after him and heard her cry out in fear. Looking back, he saw her despite the darkness, visible by her body’s heat. Her image was faint, as though the surrounding trees sucked the very warmth from her blood.
He saw her staring in horror at her feet, her mouth open in a silent scream. The ground about them was heaving, the trees swaying, and they drew closer, their bony branches waving and reaching, clawing at her arms, tearing back her hood, tangling themselves in the tight ringlets of her curly black hair. Behind her, ghostly faces floated among the black trunks of the trees, chill white hands beckoning, blue lips crying for warmth and blood. Below, clasping one ankle, was the shadow of a skeletal hand. Where it touched her flesh, darkness spread. Without thinking, Cael swung at it with his staff and missed, striking instead the soft leafy ground.
It was as though a pebble had been dropped in a pool. Ripples spread out from his blow throughout the grove, stilling the wind and silencing the voices. The hand clutching Alynthia’s ankle withdrew into the soil, the faces of the dead fled into the darkness, their eyes glowing red with hate but shrinking in fear. Alynthia swayed, and Cael caught her in his arms. Her lips were purple, her breathing shallow. She clung to him.
Though the numbing fear did not lessen, the trees about them parted and drew back, or so it seemed, clearing a narrow lane to the grove’s heart, where once the tower stood. Cael lifted Alynthia in his arms and hurried along this path, stumbling at last into the moonlight once again. He set her down in the midst of a wide glade, at the center of which lay a circular pool, a still tarn of black water or oil that reflected the moonlight like polished glass. They cast themselves beside this, though they both felt a strange reluctance to touch it.
Instead, they huddled together for warmth. Alynthia rested her head on Cael’s shoulder. Cael drank in the scent of her hair. The perfume of the yellow Ergothian lotus stilled the thundering of his heart. He pulled his cloak closer around them as the full moon climbed in the sky. Her trembling reminded him of a child he’d once held in his arms, a child he had found on the beach near his home, long ago. The child was the sole survivor of a shipwreck. He’d found her clinging to the body of her mother and had been forced to pry the girl’s fingers from the dead woman’s hair. His warmth and his strength had gradually eased her terrors even as her body gave way to shock and exhaustion. That night, the girl child had died, and then there were no longer any survivors of the shipwreck.
With the memory of her burning pyre in his mind, he pulled Alynthia closer still.
The city beyond the magical grove had ceased even to exist. It was though they were the first children of a strange god, awakening in a strange new world. All around them, the trees watched. They formed a great black wall, lurking with an evil that had been temporarily subdued by Cael’s staff. Not banished. The leaves began to stir anew, and whispers cold as death crept like a fog across the glade.
As the fresh chill began to increase, Alynthia stirred and looked into the elf’s face. His green eyes glittered in the moonlight. He did not notice her watching him. His eyes were on the accursed grove, his arms wrapped protectively around her. His gaze darted here and there, as though he saw hidden things moving among the deep shadows beneath the trees.
The beautiful captain of thieves stirred, trying to wriggle free of him. “Let go,” she mumbled.
Cael released her without a sarcastic remark. She rose and stepped toward the pool, then stopped suddenly. She turned back to him. “I’m sorry,” she said in an odd tone. “I shouldn’t have…”
“Shouldn’t have what?” he asked.
“I am your captain,” she answered firmly.
Cael wearily rose to his feet. “Very well then, Captain. What now? It looks as though the Knights have no appetite to follow us here. So, how do we get out?”
She turned away again and gazed at the pool. Cael couldn’t tell if she was hurt by his flippant tone or merely considering the options. She said without turning, “The same way we entered, I suppose.”
Cael gazed at the weapon in his hands. Many times this day it had exhibited powers quite beyond his experience. Perhaps the proximity of so much arcane magic had triggered certain latent abilities, he speculated. Nevertheless, it seemed to wield power both against magic and the undead. It had even parted the trees of the Shoikan Grove. His master had mentioned no such powers when he gave it into his hands a little more than a year ago. Cael wondered if even his venerable shalifi was aware of the staff’s full potential.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Cael said, hoisting the staff before him. He placed a hand on Alynthia’s shoulder. “With this, we shall dare the trees again,” he said.
She began to turn but immediately froze. A gasp of awe escaped her lips. “The pool,” she whispered. “Look at the pool!”
Now close enough to see into its inky depths, Cael stared in wonder at what he saw reflected there. The Tower of High Sorcery stood once more. In the pool’s shining reflection, it rose high above the treetops of the Shoikan Grove, a shape of both beauty and horror. Before it, the old gate still stood, its rusted bars twisted into phantasmagoric shapes by the power of the Black Robe’s dying curse. Cael could see the remnant of the mages robe’s still dangling from the spike on which he perished.
Above the image of the tower, stars wheeled in unfamiliar courses, stars arranged in constellations that shocked the elf to the core of his being. The constellations were those of the platinum dragon facing a five-headed dragon across an open book. Other figures took shape in the surrounding stars-scales, a harp, a vulture, a ram, and many others.
Chasing each other across the night sky, reflected in the pool, were three moons. Each was more beautiful and captivating than the cold white moon that shone in the real sky. One moon shone with a bright silver light, the other was a red as elven wine, the third an ebon hole evoking the tapestry of the night.
Cael knew these moons, he remembered these stars. A vision came unbidden to his mind. He remembered waking as a child and seeing through his bedroom window the red moon, Lunitari, rising from the Sirrion Sea.
Cael’s staff began to glow. A nimbus of silver light spread along its length, then a red glow rose at the tips. Finally, the black ironwood of the staff itself seemed to throb with energy, not light and not an absence of light, but somehow, light’s antithesis.
These moons, these stars, had vanished after the Chaos War, almost forty years ago. They could not be, and yet they were there, reflected in the mysterious pool. Both thieves looked up, only to find the familiar field of stars above them, the familiar white moon still racing among tatters of clouds.
They returned their gaze to the pool. Now, they saw on the tower’s highest balcony a figure robed in darkness. He was neither an illusion nor a trick of the mind. Both Alynthia and the elf felt as though this black figure were staring fiercely at them, angry at their intrusion upon his solitude. He raised his hands, the sleeves of his ebon robes slid back, revealing milky white skin. Nimble hands scribed cabalistic symbols on the air, lips writhed. They heard a voice, filled with power yet far away, speaking not on the air but in the secrecy of their minds, as though in a dream, uttering words of magic.