'And unless the Dasati are total idiots,' added Alenburga, 'they won't let themselves be drawn into a cl.u.s.ter like that again. I won't guess how they think, but if I was their commander, I'd be plotting how to get my own cavalry into the fight.' He let out a sigh. 'It's been a long day.' As the sun lowered in the west, he asked, 'Do we know if they fight at night?'

'We have no intelligence on that,' answered Kaspar.

'Your young Jommy is right. We cannot make a.s.sumptions about how these creatures think and act.' Alenburga turned to those officers waiting behind the three senior leaders of the Empire's army and said, 'I want the field cleared of the wounded as quickly as possible, and I want defensive positions erected even faster. We will act as if we know another attack is coming after sundown.'

Another attack came after sundown.

In the vast tunnel, Pug held up his hand and they waited, listening. He had given himself the responsibility of moving ahead of the vanguard as an advanced scout, because he was, except for Magnus, the most powerful single being in this invasion force. Magnus had been stationed next to Valko and told to protect him at all costs.

There had been a constant background sound as they entered the tunnel, and it had got increasingly loud as they pa.s.sed near tunnels that Martuch said led from the palace complex to the Black Temple, in a rough latticework fashion. It was hard to put the name to the sound, but it caused Pug's skin to crawl.

Pug motioned for the force behind him to move along, and over a thousand Deathknights loyal to the White came forward, moving with deliberate haste. No one knew for certain exactly how long the palace guards would be occupied with the slaughter of the city's vast population, but this attack had to be conducted before any significant number of them returned from this mission of death.

Pug detected movement ahead, and felt his pulse race as he antic.i.p.ated, at long last, a direct confrontation with the Deathpriests who protected the TeKarana. While preparing for this raid, Pug had asked Valko and the others for as much information as they could provide about what they might encounter. It proved to be sketchy at best. Little was known beyond this old, abandoned sub-bas.e.m.e.nt complex attached to the closest access to the TeKarana's private complex within the Great Palace. The TeKarana was served by a thousand dedicated Talnoy Pug didn't feel the need to share his knowledge of the real Talnoy still hidden on Midkemia, or that these were merely men in armour that looked like the ancient captured G.o.ds of the Dasati. He lived in a community almost completely isolated from the rest of the beings on this planet. He had his own staff who were separate from the larger palace staff of Effectors, Facilitators, Interlocutors, and other minor Lessers, and a harem of females chosen from the better houses in the Empire. There had never been any record of his acknowledging a son. Moreover, it was unclear when this TeKarana had taken over from his predecessor and how. Rumours abounded, but no one knew the truth of it. It was suspected that one of the planetary Karanas would be selected to replace the ultimate leader when it was time, but no one outside the innermost society of rulers on this world knew exactly how the system worked.

Pug reached what appeared to be a dead end, a blank wall of the ubiquitous black-grey stone used as the primary building material in the Empire. He motioned for Valko to approach and said, 'Is there a way in or do I have to break it down?'

Valko seemed impressed, for the first time since meeting Pug. 'You can break this down?'

'Not quietly.'

Valko actually smiled, the first time Pug had seen him do so. 'No, there is a way.'

Martuch and Hirea came forward and the three of them spread out and placed their hands on the wall, feeling for something that Pug could not see, no matter what aspect of his magic-enhanced sight he used. After a few minutes, Hirea reached low and triggered a mechanism. There was a deep but surprisingly soft rumble and the ma.s.sive wall rolled into a pocket on the right, revealing another pa.s.sage leading up.

'This way,' Valko said, and Pug and Magnus entered the pa.s.sageway, towards the palace.

Nakor held Bek back. Bek was dressed in the strangely disturbing armour of the Talnoy, a look very familiar to Nakor from the time he had examined ten thousand of the things hidden in a vast cavern on Midkemia, an experience bordering on the mystical. But there was nothing remotely mystic about these Talnoy, for each was simply a fanatic, loyal to the TeKarana, wearing ancient armour. The red-trimmed black armour of the palace guards was far less ornate than the gold-trimmed monstrosity now worn by Bek, and both were far gaudier than the real Talnoy armour Nakor had seen. It was as if the Dark One's servants had felt the need to be more impressive in appearance than those they had replaced.

Nakor had heard the summons to the palace before Bek could respond, and had simply ushered his young companion into an alcove off a storage room, as hundreds of Talnoy guards hurried to answer the call. Bek had not questioned Nakor's instructions, but Nakor could tell he was getting restless after sitting silently in this tiny room for hours. Softly Nakor said, 'Soon. They'll be here soon.'

'Who will be here, Nakor?' asked the hulking young man.

'Pug and the others.'

'Then what will we do, Nakor? I want to do something.'

'You will be able to do something soon, my friend,' whispered Nakor. 'It will be something you like a lot.'

Miranda could feel the fatigue threatening to overwhelm her, yet she forced herself to cast one more spell of scrying. Then her eyes opened wide and her head jerked back as if someone had slapped her.

'What is it?' asked General Alenburga. His eyes narrowed in his sunburned face as he studied her.

'That hurt.'

'What hurt?' asked Kaspar of Olasko.

'They've erected some sort of... barrier against scrying inside that thing.'

Two dozen additional magicians had gathered since the end of the first phase of the battle, just before sunset, and they were a welcome sight when the Dasati started their second a.s.sault an hour after sundown. The Tsurani had used a different tactic this time, convinced that the Dasati would not err again and try to charge a fixed position where the Tsurani could surround them.

Alenburga had ordered a company of Tsurani engineers who had arrived towards the end of the battle to erect as many barriers as they could across the opening where the river trail emptied into the plain. The Dasati could still come through, but not in numbers unless they first stopped to remove the barriers, or tried to swim downriver.

Then a dozen heavy ballista and a pair of trebuchets were unloaded from the wagons and erected, just as the Dasati again advanced down the trail. As their vanguard reached the end of the trail, Tsurani archers high in the hills overhead fired down on them, every fifth arrow being aflame, while those operating the trebuchets hurled huge barrels of flammable oil into the pa.s.s. The barrels each held fifty gallons of oil, and they were designed to disintegrate on impact, spreading the oil in every direction. It took a few minutes for the fire to begin in earnest, but after it caught hold began, it quickly erupted into an inferno that forced many Deathknights into the river where they were pulled under the fast-moving water by the weight of their own armour, or helped to their death by Tsurani spearmen who used their long pole-arms to hold the Dasati underwater as they attempted to reach either riverbank.

After an hour of this, the Dasati beat a hasty retreat up the path.

Now they were attempting to antic.i.p.ate the Dasati's next move, hence Miranda's attempted scrying. 'I was never very good at that sort of thing, anyway,' she said.

The four young captains were waiting nearby, all of them showing evidence of fatigue. Zane was nearly asleep on his feet and Tad had to nudge him a few times to keep him alert. General Alenburga noticed and said, 'Pa.s.s the word to stand down. Set pickets at the edge of the hills, a mile in each direction, and we'll wait. Find whatever comfort you may and get some rest.'

The four young officers hurried off to discharge their duty and take a break.

Alenburga said to Miranda, 'I don't have any idea how you do what it is you do, but you look as if you could sleep for a month. Go. I have a tent set up a mile or so to the rear. There's food and a sleeping pallet there.' He detailed a soldier to escort her, and added, 'My thanks to you and the other magicians. I doubt we'd be standing here if it wasn't for your amazing skills.'

Miranda gave him a wan smile. 'Thank you. If you send for me, I can be here in minutes.'

Alenburga cast his gaze in the direction of the Black Mount. 'I doubt we'll be hearing from our new friends before dawn. They may see in the dark like cats, but we've given them a lot to think about.' As he watched Miranda departing with the escort, Alenburga said to Erik and Kaspar. 'That's what I'm the most worried about.'

'What they're thinking?'

'Yes,' said the General.

Erik said, 'Something occurred to me during this last struggle.'

'Out with it then,' said Alenburga. 'You don't strike me as the shy type.'

Erik smiled. 'I didn't want to speculate until I saw if they were going to come at us a third time.'

'What is it?' asked Kaspar.

'Why make the second attack? All they have to do is hold us outside the river pa.s.s, keep us some distance back, and eventually that sphere is going to encompa.s.s this area and they can strike out in any direction. More to the point, why go to the trouble of creating all that slaughter in the first place? Why not just keep expanding the sphere?'

Alenburga ran his hand over his face. 'My eyes feel like I've got a desert's worth of grit in them.' He looked at Erik first, then Kaspar. 'There are a lot of questions I have no answers to.' He paused, then said, 'How did the Kingdom defeat the Tsurani in the first place, is one.'

Erik said, 'I've studied every record of that war, and the best answer I can come up with is, because the Tsurani weren't serious about it.'

'A twelve-year war and they weren't serious?'

'Seems it was merely a side ploy in some big political game they were playing here.'

'I'd hate to see what would have happened if they had been serious,' said Kaspar.

'We'd all be speaking Tsurani from birth, I think,' observed Alenburga. He took a deep breath. 'But none of the descendants of the Tsurani will be left to speak Dasati if we don't prevail.'

'What next?' asked Kaspar.

'We wait.' The General looked around for a likely place to sit and found a large rock where he could lean back. He sat down and said, 'The really bad thing is that I have no idea what to expect next from those monsters in the dome. The good thing is that come early morning tomorrow, we'll have three times the soldiers to throw at them.'

'Something tells me,' said Erik, sitting down nearby, 'we'll need them.'

Kaspar remained standing and looked towards the sphere as if he could somehow see it in the dark. Softly he asked, 'But will that be enough?'

Joachim of Ran was nervous. He was nervous every time it was his turn to watch the ten thousand motionless Talnoy. He was also nervous because the only other magician from Sorcerer's Isle who was on duty was no older than he was barely twenty-six years of age and he had even less experience as a magician, and was sound asleep outside.

The Conclave had been taking care of these... things, for some time now, Joachim a.s.sumed. He didn't really know much beyond his instructions, which were to watch them in shifts with other magicians who came and went from Sorcerer's Isle, do nothing, but make sure someone knew if anything untoward occurred in this vast cavern.

Joachim was not entirely sure what 'untoward' meant exactly, but he was entirely sure he wouldn't like it if he knew. He couldn't help how he felt; these motionless things in the vast cavern below were unnerving, standing row upon row like monstrous toy warriors, each in identical armour, each as unmoving as the rocks surrounding- He blinked. Did one of them move? He felt his heart pound and his skin puckered with gooseflesh. He looked hard, but he could see no sign. It must have been some trick of the night, a game of the mind, he decided, yet still his heart raced.

Should he call Milton, the other magician? Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Joachim thought he would only be mocked if he did. He applied himself to needlessly adjusting the single torch stuck in the make-shift sconce above him, and decided it was the flickering of the light that had caused the illusion. No wonder the mind played tricks. He was once more astonished at how far the illumination carried in this otherwise pitch-black hole in the ground. He took another deep, calming breath, and turned his attention back to the tome in his lap. After his first stint of guard duty here he had decided to at least keep current on his studies. He was not the finest scholar in the Conclave and needed to refresh his memory on the more convoluted cantrips, and he had particular trouble with the ones written in Keshian, as he was not a very good student of languages.

He turned his attention to the page and after a while became lost in trying to master an especially odd phrasing. Then out of the corner of his eye, he saw another flicker of movement and his head jerked up. In the front row of the long line of Talnoy...

He had to get hold of his imagination. Everything was exactly as it had been moments before... or was it? Heart thumping, unsure of what to do, Joachim waited, watching for any other movement.

The first of the TeKarana's guards to spot Valko's forces died before his mind could register what it was he saw. Pug had decided against subtlety at this point and simply used a very basic spell of physical control to throw the man as hard as he could against a distant stone wall. It had the same impact as if he had fallen five hundred feet onto hard rock. The sound of it, certainly, was bound to alert others down the hallway to the fact that something was amiss. The splatter of orange blood covered yards in every direction.

'Impressive,' said Martuch to Magnus. 'I must remember not to annoy your father.'

'Good decision,' said the younger magician, a little surprised at the Dasati's dry humour in this situation. Of course, compared to the other Dasati they had encountered, Martuch was almost human in his outlook. But Magnus was equally surprised at his father's outburst, and realized that Pug must have been concealing a profound amount of anxiety since they arrived in this realm. And since he knew that Pug never worried about himself, he must be anxious about Magnus, Nakor, and even that very strange young man, Ralan Bek.

Magnus knew there were things going on that his father had not confided in him, and that Nakor and Bek were playing some role that he could not antic.i.p.ate, but he had come to trust his father implicitly over the years. A prodigious talent even as a child, Magnus had always been given the opportunity to master his craft at his own pace, challenged, but never overburdened, and that training, despite his mother's often impressive lack of patience, had given him a graceful approach to a very difficult practice. Magnus knew some day he might surpa.s.s his parents in ability, but that was still decades away, and right now there was a very real question if he would live minutes, let alone decades.

Pug turned a corner leading into a vast gallery, in which a company of Talnoy guards lounged, apparently a reserve squad detailed to go wherever they were needed at a moment's notice, for the chamber had a dozen large pa.s.sages leading out of it like spokes. A few had their helms off, chatting while they waited, and once again Pug realized how much of their advantage came from the illusion these armoured figures were the Talnoy of myth, the nearly impossible killing machines feared by all.

Pug didn't hesitate. He raised one hand above his head, and a ma.s.sive display of blue energy a huge pale globe in which lightning danced appeared above that hand. He hurled the globe into the midst of the Talnoy Deathknights. Sparks of energy shot out first one way, then another, dancing from target to target, stunning each warrior they touched and throwing them into a momentary seizure. Some fell over twitching while others stood upright as if locked in paralysis: folly a third of those in the company were incapacitated by Pug's spell.

Valko and his men charged.

Taken by surprise, the two hundred Talnoy were unable to respond in any organized fashion. More than half the Talnoy were executed as they lay twitching on the floor or while attempting to rise, and those who had managed to put up some resistance were quickly overcome. Two or three warriors of the White a.s.saulted each Talnoy still standing and suddenly it was over. Pug did a quick inventory and saw two of Valko's Deathknights were dead and dozens had minor wounds, while the Talnoy lay dead to the last man.

Pug looked from tunnel to tunnel, wondering which way to move, and examined the markings above each entrance. In Dasati fashion, energy glyphs designating the tunnel's use were inscribed within the stone, visible only to Dasati eyes, their equivalent to a road sign with destinations on it. Pug quickly scanned each and then he saw it, an energy glyph much larger than the others. It must be the mark of the TeKarana.

As if hearing Pug's unanswered question, Valko pointed to that very glyph and said, 'That way.'

Pug looked down the long tunnel. They were one long dash from the TeKarana's apartment. He said, 'Magnus should come up between us, for we haven't seen a Deathpriest yet, and when we do, we may see quite a few of them.'

Valko said, 'Your magic is impressive, human. If it can be used in a more selective fashion, that would be useful; it may be some of them are agents for the White. We have a few placed high within the palace, and they might have contrived a plausible reason to not be involved in the murder at the Black Temple. I trust some of them are still here in the palace, for as soon as we attack, they will join us.'

'One can only hope,' Pug whispered. 'Still, we'll a.s.sume none of them are until we know otherwise.' He motioned for his son to move ahead of Valko. 'Keep me in sight but fall back to protect Lord Valko if you see the need.'

Magnus said nothing as his father hurried ahead. He waited for a moment, then set out after him.

Nakor waited, listening, and then he heard it. 'Come along, Bek. We are going to go find you a fight.'

'Good, Nakor. I was very tired of standing still,' said the large young man.

They hurried along, half-running, half-trotting, towards the sound of battle.

'When we get there,' said Nakor. 'Can you kill all those wearing armour like yours and leave the others alone, please?'

'Yes, Nakor.'

'Oh, and you might want to take your helmet off so that Pug and the others know who you are.'

'Yes, Nakor,' said Bek, immediately taking off his helm and casting it aside.

As they neared the sounds of fighting, Nakor said, 'Remember what I said?'

'Yes, Nakor. Can I go now?'

'Yes, go,' said the spry little gambler.

They rounded the hallway and at the far end could see a vast courtyard opening up to the heavens. Even from where they stood they could see that a fairly impressive fight was in progress. From the blinding flashes of energy and deafening sounds reverberating down the hall, Nakor judged that Pug and Magnus must be there, which was as he wanted things to be. He sensed that the time was fast approaching when all of his plans, plans that had been years in the making, were at last about to come together.

The only concern he had left was, would Ralan Bek, a total madman, play his part? Everything Nakor needed to have happen, the fate of three worlds, and the lives of everyone he had come to care about over the last hundred years, would come to nothing if Leso Varen did not do as Nakor expected him to do. There were times, thought Nakor, when being a gambler was not necessarily a good thing.