"But children learn, Hadrian. We can learn. We'll watch Travis." She clenched a fist. "And we'll get to him before Duratek."

"Perhaps. But what of those who might get to him before that?"

Deirdre frowned, lowering her hand. "Who do you mean?"

Hadrian shut the journal and said nothing.

14,.

The sky was burning.

Travis sat on the crumbled remains of a wall--its bricks darkened with smoke and cracked by heat-- and watched the dawn trickle into the valley. He craned his stiff neck and gazed at the ruins around him: the slumped remnants of a stone chimney, the scorched plane of a plaster wall, pieces of furniture scattered on the ground, as charred and tortured as anything dug up from the ash beds of Pompeii.

What had made him come to the wreckage of the Magician's Attic? It wasn't until first light transmuted the sky from slate to steel that he 86 had even realized this was where his feet had led him after he fled the opera house. But maybe it made some sort of sense. In a way, this was where the fires had all begun.

"Where, is Jakabar of the Gray Stone Travis heard the desiccated hiss again, as if the man in black had just whispered it in his ear. Jakabar of the Gray Stone--Jack Graystone. It was Jack. It had to be. Who else would the man in black have been 82 mark anthony searching for? If Travis still had any doubts, then the evidence Deirdre and Farr had shown him last night had erased them.

Travis gripped his right hand and stared at the remnants of the antique shop. Anger flared in his heart, as hot and bright as the sun.

"It's not fair, Jack," he whispered. "It's not fair, leaving me the way you did. Now I'm stuck with everything you abandoned, and I don't understand it. I'm not even close. People are looking for you, and it's me they're finding instead, and I don't know what to do. You got off easy."

The sun peered over the shoulder of Castle Peak. Travis lifted his head, stared into the hot eye, and willed himself to burn as Jack had burned.

Something dark eclipsed the sun, and a cool shadow fell across his face.

At first he could not see, then his eyes adjusted, and his gaze discerned the two figures who stood before him. He pushed up hisspectacles, then slipped from the wall.

The woman and the girl wore dresses black as cinders, and their faces were pale as the moon in day. The child's hair was dark--as if the stuff of night still clung to her--but the woman's hair caught the dawn light and spun it into copper. Travis drew in a breath of wonder. But this too made sense. They had been here the last time everything had 87 changed.

"Samanda," he whispered.

The girl regarded him with wise purple eyes. "We have been looking for you," she said in a lisping voice.

Despite the strangeness of the moment, Travis's lips curled in a bitter smile. "You're not the only ones."

The woman groped with a hand, then clutched the girl's shoulder. "Is it him, then? Does he stand before 83.

"Yes, Sister Mirrim," the child said. "He does indeed."

Travis glanced up, and only then did he see the strip of gauze that had been bound across the woman's face, concealing her eyes. He looked back at the girl. "What happened to her?"

"She gazed into the fire, to see what lay within."

Travis shook his head. "She's blind, then?"

Now it was Child Samanda who smiled, the pink bud of her mouth turning upward in a knowing curve. "Fear not for Sister Mirrim. She has other vision, other eyes."

It felt as if Travis stood on a carousel, the world slowly spinning around him. "I don't understand."

The girl held out a hand. A black shape rested on her small palm: a raven folded of crisp paper.

Travis staggered back and caught himself against the wall. This couldn't be happening, not again.

"I see it," Sister Mirrim whispered. "The birds of night have fallen, 88 their wings have been burned. New dark ones come, and-all the land shrivels under their touch." Her hands curled into claws at her sides, and her voice rose into a shrill chant. "The Dead One who was forgotten walks again. He has locked the heart of fire in his prison, and--no! It must not be! He holds a flaming sword in his hand. He will cut a wound in the sky, to grasp the stars, and all the world will drown in a rain of blood!"

Travis stared at Sister Mirrim, and wet horror filled his lungs. Red tears streamed from the bandage that covered her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

"You must go," the girl said.Travis tore his gaze from Sister Mirrim and looked down at the child.

The paper raven was gone. Her small hand held only ashes, and even as he watched the wind blew these away.

"But where?" His mouth was a desert, his voice a fr/-t- trtc'4- Ml/rl^4- 1^ rt A l^Q^M rt 1 /-