"What?" Dakar swiveled to stare, startled enough to ignore the branch which slapped his exposed side. The surprise seemed unfair, that Arithon had observed more than anyone else while apparently lapsed into a stupor. A tug on the rein stopped his gelding, while the Shadow Master's mount followed suit by dumb instinct.

Felltin halted his gray, his plain, honest face charged to wonder- ment. "Masterbard," he murmured, "in truth, Halliron's teaching unveiled your true destiny. My life has been spent in devotion to music, and yet, my ear can't detect this nuance you speak of."

Sunk as the Shadow Master was in discomfort, his precise sense of 415.

JANN WURTS.

language never left him. Caught back in reflective speculation by one word, Dakar twisted aside to pursue inquiry. "Existence?"

Like a child in creased clothes iogged out of a drea~~~ :rith0!

straightened. He blinked unfocused green eyes. His ha~~i~ ran sweat where he changed grip to the saddle out of shameless stay upright. "Don't say you hadn't noticed the landscape i~ ble."

"Damn you!" Dakar resisted a hysterical laugh. Through tl~c tre~ to the right, he had just glimpsed a broad, grassy plain. Beyo~t skyline edged in mountains whose shattered white peaks belong:ted no range in Athera. "Why not use your boot and kick me awake?

be eternally grateful."

But this time, the victim was too spent to counter that lame of sarcasm. His painstaking effort to order plain thought bec,~.~ue trial to witness. Felirin politely averted his gaze, while sought to translate impressions with comprehensible clarity. "I add that the earth where your horse treads is anything but ground."

"Well, try the next riddle with an answer at the end." The Prophet looped his reins in the crook of one elbow and massagt.,t pounding temples. His balked effort to plumb the phenomel~.~ mage-sight had left him high strung and dizzy. "If I didn't kno~'

ter, I'd swear my talent's gone blind and dead as your own."

An hour spent immersed in furious thought had left the binder no whit the wiser. Here, the sparkling energy ties which lac the very substance of creation did not follow any pattern laid by natural forces. The aberration chewed him hollow with dread, the trees, the moss, the very sun on lit leaves remained dense and sive to mage-sense. Petrified to plumb the extent of his helpless~:~ Dakar shrugged. "If I could accept the impossible, I'd say nothin~ this place has an aura."

Eyes shut, Arithon snapped off a nod. "You're surprised? This ity isn't alive by any founding law of Ath's creation."

Dakar bridled to hear his foreboding confirmed. "However you know?"

Too stressed for impatience, Arithon said, "I still have my bar ear. The vibration of this existence is not myriad, but seems to loomed from one thread." He labored to qualify. "The song of being does not change register, not for a tree, or a rock, or an Since the shadows as well won't answer my gift, I have to presu they're illusions. The logical end point is scarcely reassuring. We m be traversing a path through a dream."

416.

FUGITIVE I~RINCE.

A chill splashed over Dakar's moist skin. "Save us all, don't say that. If that's true, somewhere there must be a great drake, still alive and sleeping."

But Arithon had retreated back into dazed silence. The bay mare bore his suffering weight, hunched and half-senseless in the saddle, leaving Dakar floundering and alone with his terror.

The warning strictures remonstrated by Asandir posed a fearful array of hidden pitfalls. Their small party dared not disturb any aspect of symmetry in this unworldly place. To take even apparent life, or to strip so much as one green branch would cause a strand of continuity to shift resonance. A balance would change, demanding harsh forfeit, and no power of mercy might spare the offender from the fate of that unknown consequence. Whatever fell power enacted this sphere of illusion must not be aroused to the presence of tres- passers.

"As you love life, walk softly," Dakar entreated, aware the least act could distress the loomed pattern of integral consciousness surround- ing them.

Their footsteps were now guided by a force of unknown magni- tude, and retreat of any kind was impossible.

Felirin alone retained the brash whimsy to flirt with poetic phras- ing. "Will we or nil we, we're drawn toward the center. I wonder what we're going to find?"

"Something Asandir never spoke of, even on his good days." Fed up with the minstrel's feckless temperament, Dakar let fly out of pique. "Take great care you don't snap any twigs."

For whatever unearthly pocket this grimward carved out, they had no choice but to grapple its uncanny mystery headlong.

The first time the apparent season changed, Felirin cried out in shock.

Dakar gawped and inhaled the frizzled ends of his mustache. His perception had not lied. The leafed autumn wood had transformed at one step to the cobalt gloaming of winter twilight. Low, rolling hills lapped away to a snow-clad horizon. Treeless, the crests wore mantling drifts like honed cleavers. The wind snarled and gusted.

The breath Dakar drew to indulge in rank curses sieved cold like spilled mercury through his lungs.

The forest was gone as if expunged from existence, and the new vista offered no shelter. Too exhausted to bolt, the horses shivered and stamped, their labored exhalations trailing white plumes against the deepening purple of dusk. The stars blazed overhead like chips in 417.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

A chill splashed over Dakar's moist skin. "Save us all, don't say If that's true, somewhere there must be a great drake, still alive and sleeping."

But Arithon had retreated back into dazed silence. The bay mare bore his suffering weight, hunched and half-senseless in the saddle, leaving Dakar floundering and alone with his terror.

The warning strictures remonstrated by Asandir posed a fearful array of hidden pitfalls. Their small party dared not disturb any aspect of symmetry in this unworldly place. To take even apparent life, or to strip so much as one green branch would cause a strand of continuity to shift resonance. A balance would change, demanding harsh forfeit, and no power of mercy might spare the offender from the fate of that unknown consequence. Whatever fell power enacted this sphere of illusion must not be aroused to the presence of tres- passers.

"As you love life, walk softly," Dakar entreated, aware the least act could distress the loomed pattern of integral consciousness surround- ing them.

Their footsteps were now guided by a force of unknown magni- tude, and retreat of any kind was impossible.

Felirin alone retained the brash whimsy to flirt with poetic phras- ing. "Will we or nil we, we're drawn toward the center. ! wonder what we're going to find?"

"Something Asandir never spoke of, even on his good days." Fed up with the minstrel's feckless temperament, Dakar let fly out of pique. "Take great care you don't snap any twigs."

For whatever unearthly pocket this grimward carved out, they had no choice but to grapple its uncanny mystery headlong.

The first time the apparent season changed, Felirin cried out in shock.

Dakar gawped and inhaled the frizzled ends of his mustache. His perception had not lied. The leafed autumn wood had transformed at one step to the cobalt gloaming of winter twilight. Low, rolling hills lapped away to a snow-clad horizon. Treeless, the crests wore mantling drifts like honed cleavers. The wind snarled and gusted.

The breath Dakar drew to indulge in rank curses sieved cold like spilled mercury through his lungs.

The forest was gone as if expunged from existence, and the new vista offered no shelter. Too exhausted to bolt, the horses shivered and stamped, their labored exhalations trailing white plumes against the deepening purple of dusk. The stars blazed overhead like chips in 417.

JANNY WUI~T$.

black ice. No moon arose to diminish their splendor, nor did the stellarions form any pattern familiar to Athera.

Arithon volunteered his sparse comment through a pause to share the brandy the innkeeper's wife had tucked into the provisions in the saddlebags. "I know this sky. The stars were never so bright, but on Dascen Elur, ships' masters navigated by these same constellations."

He passed the flask on to Felirin, and added, "I wonder if our thoughts could be bending the dream?"

"Then you recognize this plain?" Dakar swiped off the ice crystals lodged in his brows, too dispirited to show disappointment as the Master of Shadow shook his head.

"This landscape doesn't match my memory of Dascen Elur. At least, no landmass encountered by my father's ships seemed this wretchedly desolate." Arithon's voice seemed leached of all feeling as he qualified. "Even on those barren archipelagoes where families mined salt from the silted lagoons, scrub thom grew on the high ground."

Worried afresh by the lifeless flatness to the Masterbard's expres- sion, Dakar attempted to hold his gaze and measure the depths of his internal despair. But Arithon refused even that slight contact, his mouth a taut line of strained nerves.

The small party pressed on when the brandy was finished. Felirin rode with his eyes shut, lips working, perhaps in a verse from some ancient ballad, or in prayer to Ath. Huddled in his singed cloak with both hands swathed and poulticed, and his pert scarlet tassels shred- ded to threads from unkindly fire and hard usage, he seemed a tatter- demalion beggar left witwandering in the night.

Dakar pondered their changed surroundings, not a bit reassured that the sky overhead seemed to match Arithon's recollection. He had never thought to ask Althain's Warden whether dragons had flown past the Worldsend Gates. That fine point might come to matter dearly in the future. If in fact the great drakes had not cached the memory of these far-off stars as a backdrop for their present-day dreams, then trouble would shadow the chances of their mortal sur- vival.

The danger could not be discounted or ignored, that this disjointed frame of existence might prey upon human thoughts, then manifest their dark contents. If such linkage occurred, then Arithon's shattered equilibrium could couple with Felirin's penchant for foolhardy fancy and brew up an unconscionable risk. The chance was too frightening, that the impassioned knots of subconscious pain might weave them- selves into the loom of the uncanny forces that clothed this alternate 418.

~on- FUGITIVE.

reality. If so, the unimaginable guilt held in check by a blood oath could unleash, all unwitting, a murderous, tormented revenge as a subjective nightmare of horrors.

Shaken stark silent, Dakar sketched a sign to avert the ill thought, that the grimward's effects might come to magnify Arithon's despair. The best-willed intent to repress a death wish might twist free of constraint and remanifest in this place as a parallel act of self- punishment.

Through the pound of his heart, Dakar leaned across and spoke directly to Arithon. "Use your mage training. Wrap your mind into silence, and don't for a second drop your guard."

The Master of Shadow opened tortured green eyes. "Ath save us all, I've already done so." He cast a weighted glance toward Felirin's turned back.

For of course, the free minstrel owned no such schooled discipline to lock down the unrestrained play of the mind.

Dakar chewed his lip. He knew illicit lore, had knowledge of sigils to force the will and bend a man's acts through the use of sheared lines of power Such craft broke the Law of the Major Balance. Eddies of recoiling damage could backlash on both the victim and wielder Yet here in this place, such a safeguard might mean the difference between life and death.

Left cold to the bone by the bent of his thoughts, even granted the impetus of a terrible expediency, Dakar startled to the sudden restraint of a hand on his wrist.

"Don't, Dakar," said Arithon s'Ffalenn. His shackling grasp did not loosen. "I thought the same once on the banks of Tal Quorin. Believe me, no stakes are worth such a cost. I've lost direct access to my mage talent as a penalty, and would give any price in my power to reverse that decision."

Dakar swallowed, undone by the leveling force of an honesty he could not match. Nor could he restate the horrid, cold fact, that the harmonious continuity of Athera yet hung on the thread of Prince Arithon's life. "If need warrants, even you cannot stop me," he said finally.

The hold on him released in an unspeakable surrender That act, and the numbing silence that followed ran against every tenet of fight in Arithon's character. An ominous sign, with no joy in the victory, that Dakar held such sway over a friend whose innate strength had always outmatched him. "I'll hold my decision," he temporized, to no avail.

The Teir's'Ffalenn had retreated past reach behind the stone mask of his training.

419.

JANNY WUR?$.

Very quickly after that, all concerns became moot before the raw cruelty of the elements. Gusts bit through every inadequate layer ~ clothing. Horses could not withstand such punishing colcl v~~xx rations o[ grain and odder. Half-shed into their sleek summer hair, they were already suffering. Nor did the queer, bending track through the gloaming permit a retreat by retracing their steps into autumn. Concerned that Arithon and Felirin were left in more fragile condition than he, Dakar insisted that the pair ride double on the gray and share the warmth of the drover's cloak between them.

The small party plowed on, horses laboring chest high through sifted pockets of snow. Stuffed like a sausage in two of Felirin's court- style tunics, Dakar blinked melted snow from his lashes and startled to the clang of shod hooves on rock. The frigid air left his lungs in a gasp as the stars and bleak snowfields all vanished.

The three riders moved now under a sky streaked with dawn, across sands grooved and black as raked basalt. The air held the forge-tang of desert and a flint-dry cloy of fine dust. No birds flew.

The arid vista seemed lifeless as Kathtairr, except for the massive, clawed tracks of a predator which scored the ribbed flank of a dune.

"Seardluin," Dakar whispered through a throat parched to paper by a devastating stab of fresh fear. In Athera, Fellowship intervention may have battled the monstrous killers to extinction; yet in the shel- tered existence of drake-dream, the creatures would prowl still, their marauding thirst for blood raised to a scale of unimaginable vicious- ness. "If even one catches wind of our horses, we're finished."

Felirin pushed back the limp folds of the drover's hood. "Arithon's unconscious," he said softly.

The Mad Prophet vented an explosion of oaths. No telling, now, whether the defenses ingrained in the Shadow Master's mage train- ing might contain the subconscious poison past memories and grief might engender.

Between blowing on numbed hands and fighting to slip the stiff- ened straps of the buckles on his saddlebags, the Mad Prophet flung back stopgap instructions. "Felirin, pack up that cloak. You may need your hands free. And we'll have to shift Arithon back onto the mare."

The spellbinder scrounged out two stout pairs of horse hobbles.

Focused and made desperate by full awareness that he must safe- guard the body that housed the self-haunted powers of s'Ffalenn con- science, despite the latent potential for disaster that same mind might seed to envelop them all, Dakar tossed the restraints to Felirin. "Tie your Masterbard astride. Don't think of pity. Strap him down fight, or he's lost if we have to gallop."

420.

FUGITIVE PRINCE.

"The horses are spent. We ought to be leading them." Felirin fum- bled with poulticed hands to assist as Dakar directed. Together, they fastened the stiff leather cuffs around Arithon's wrists and ankles, and bound his slack form to his horse's girth and breast strap.

That grim preventative was scarcely completed when Dakar looked up. "Dharkaron wept!" A massive, dark shadow slunk sinu- ously into the hollow where they took shelter. He snatched the bard's wrist. "Don't move or breathe."

Felirin glanced back, aghast. The next moment the three horses shied sidewards and tore at the reins trying to bolt.

Dakar held on, half-weeping, though both of his hands were skinned raw. Standing or running, they had no chance at all once the monsters that approached charged to hunt.

There were four of them, coats like rippling sable, and horned heads burnished to polished gold under the harsh desert sunlight.

The powerful, maned shoulders stood high as an ox. The forefeet bore fearsome talons. The muzzles extended into jaws with scaled plates, and fangs that were cruelly poisonous. The eyes were pale as poured oil, and slitted like a snake's. Dakar was aware through the hammer of his pulse that nothing alive looked more lethal. While at large on Athera, Seardluin had outrun the gazelles of Sanpashir, which took bounding flight like racing shadows over parched grass and flint sands.

Never had the spellbinder known such blank fright as that moment, when the creatures on the dune paused to snuffle the wind, ears pricked to strain out the footfalls of prey. Those wide-set, mean yellow eyes swung and fixed, and seemed to stare right through him.

Then the lead creature howled in a key to bristle the hair and tear a hole through a man's slackened bowels. Slumped on the mare's crest, Arithon groaned.

Dakar reached out, pitiless, and muffled the cry with his palm.

Then, as if tuned to one thought, the Seardluin moved on, lithe, deadly, and uninterested. They passed not three yards from the horses, who quivered and dripped sweat in rank fear.

Felirin shrank, shaking, against the damp heat of his gelding.

"Ath's blessed mercy, I don't think they knew us."

Weak kneed with shock, Dakar resisted the urge to collapse where he stood. "We must not be visible to them in this spectrum of dream.

If we were, I assure you, we'd be torn limb from limb."

Felirin offered no argument. Once the horses had settled enough to walk calmly, he remounted and pressed on, trailing the mare which bore Arithon. From behind, the wind carried a drawn-out howl, then 421.

JANNY WURTS.

the sounds of a snarling fight. Screams that sounded human slic~ the baked air, then the drumroll report of hapless horses set to flight sheared through by a chilling clang of steel. ~~ "Hold fast!" Dakar tightened his grip on Arithon's reins, twisted to see over his shoulder.

Five horsemen burst over the ridge at his back, mounts stretche a lathered gallop. Down a grade unsuited to headlong flight, they and skated. Sand caved and gave way beneath panicked Against the fierce, copper glare off the dunes, Dakar made out Hanshire town blazon sewn on their saddlecloths and surcoats.

"Felirin!" he cried, tensed to stab heels to his own mount and run.

Even here, the Alliance pursuit had overtaken them.

Yet even before reflex could spur startled flight, the last guardsman~ cleared the crest, shouting like a madman and driving his horse with the unsheathed flat of his sword. A grue like the precursor to prophetic sight caused Dakar to hold back raw instinct. He reined in.