"I am as prepared as I shall ever be."

  "Then leave me to the tasks I have left to do."

  Thus did he continue to not give an answer to that little mystery. Perhaps his passage through the Mists had robbed him of the ability to learn new magic. If so, then he would not be anxious to share that vulnerability with a potential antagonist. Would the same prove true for me once I crossed the barrier? It was a risk, but one I was willing to take. No mage ever has enough spells to learn; it's like an addiction to wine, but I had such a number of them at hand that I thought I could be content for a time so long as it meant escape.

  The crucial hour passed and all was finally to his satisfaction; we had only to wait until the moon was right. We could see it through the round glass window he'd placed in the tower roof high above. Each of its round panes had been shaped and specially polished to amplify the light. As soon as the moon was exactly centered we would call on and focus the flowing energies of the solstice, then he would assume control allowing me to open the portal; if all went well we could push our way through it to the plane of Oerth and finally be free.

  The center of the chamber's vast floor was interrupted by a low circular wall, quite similar to a crofter's sheep pen in construction. Only instead of flat native stones piled untidily upon one another, this was a smooth work of art. He'd had the pottery guild at it all winter turning out one identical white ceramic cube after another, thousands of them. Then it was up to the masonry guild, using a special mortar which Azalin had conjured, to lay them in their courses with mathematical precision. The finished circle stood waist high, a dozen feet across, and the wall was a foot thick. He said it would hold strong against the force of any magical energy, shaping it into a form we could readily control and exploit.

  I hoped he was right. The power of the solstice was very great. I had used it in the past with much success, but never on so large a project. It is one thing to enjoy a gentle summer rain safe indoors, quite another to survive the unchecked force of a lightning storm on the exposed face of a mountain.

  Azalin took his position on the eastern compass point of the circle, and I stood ready on the west, our mutual gaze hard upon the window above. The moon was nearly right.

  "Now," he whispered. "Begin now!"

  I obliged, muttering with him the words of power, drawing down the first thread-like flow of energy sieving through the glass panes. The tendrils, unseen by normal eyes, reached toward us both, and I felt mine start to entwine about me. Arms extended, I directed it into the circle. My eyes were shut, yet clear in my mind I could see the whole room, see the thin, pale lines of moonlight rushing along my limbs in obedience to my will. A dozen feet away Azalin did the same.

  Our voices grew louder, drawing more silver-blue light from the window. The room hummed with the sound of the building power. I began to tremble uncontrollably as the stuff surged through me, not from fear, but from the utter exhilaration of it. It was like being seized by battle-fever—beyond fear, remorse, or even anger—all that matters is the singing joy of sheer destruction. There is no beginning, no ending, only the crimson blaze of the present.

  As the moon reached its centering, we had to shout to be heard above the roaring light. It fairly gushed through the window, filling the circle we stood over, then overfilling, but the light rose up, holding to a whirling cylindrical shape. As it spun, small sparks were thrown off to be caught and passed swiftly along the glass and copper constructs. The crackling snap of the tiny lightnings added to the din; I could barely hear myself shrieking out the final words.

  Azalin continued with his incantation; I could just see his lips moving through the glare. He made several broad gestures and waited, but nothing happened. He repeated the gestures, and slowly the cylinder began to reform itself, the top retreating from the window, the base from the floor. It continued to quickly turn in midair, but the direction altered as the energy compressed, first going diagonally, then vertically. After a few worrisome moments, the cylinder gradually took on the shape of a perfect glowing sphere.

  I had anticipated this, having seen it before in Ilka's crystal ball. The vision had left out the monumental noise. The vibration of it went through my body to gnaw at my very bones. I wanted to retreat but held fast, arms still outstretched, directing more power into the thing.

  His voice cracking with the effort, Azalin screamed at me to start the next phase of the spell as he took over the effort of holding the light in a stable form.

  Shouting the words, I instantly sensed the change. The sphere bulged out, doubling its circumference until it extended beyond the boundary of the containing walls. I felt the heat of it as it swelled toward me, inches from my face. Azalin's voice rose above the din, and through the glare I saw him make a specific gesture of control.

  It didn't work. He repeated it twice more and the sphere started to shrink, the brightness increasing.

  I tried to penetrate the glare with my mind's eye, looking at it in the same way as I looked into the crystal. For an instant I caught a glimpse of green and gold. I concentrated and finally saw a true image of what lay beyond, a sight I had not seen in two centuries, a fair green land bathed in summer sunlight. Past the rolling fields rose mountains, a long range of peaks totally unfamiliar to me.

  "Open it!" Azalin ordered.

  I heard him more in my mind than with my ears and quickly launched into the final phase of the spell. The image rippled and held, growing larger until it was life-sized, and then I knew it was now a true doorway—and open.

  To daylight.

  I could survive it if I had to; there were trees present where I might find temporary shelter. If necessary I could bury myself in the ground before the burns became too severe. While unconscious I'd be at Azalin's mercy, though. A risk I'd just have to take.

  He shouted something, but I could no longer hear clearly; the roar managed to increase that much more and took on a teeth rattling high-pitched yowl. I called out the last of the incantation and saw Azalin hoist himself up on the edge of the circle. Through the vision in the sphere I could dimly see him standing on the wall.

  I felt the control weaken as his attention wavered. The whole chamber rumbled with it as though the earth itself shrugged.

  The green land faded, went suddenly hazy. The door was still open; I knew it to be open.

  Azalin set himself, then leaped toward it. Toward… mist. The Mists. The Mists were flooding the bright sphere.

  His momentum suddenly ceased; he hung in the core of the sphere like a fly in a web, slowly turning and tumbling out of control.

  The sphere began to grow and became too bright to look at. The noise went beyond hearing, beyond bearing. I made one last effort to hold it together, knowing it would be useless; things were quite outside my control. The future as revealed by Ilka's crystal was about to become the past. My last spell exhausted, I dropped and dove for cover against the outer wall of the circle an instant before the blast ripped through the chamber.

  The force of it rushed over me, slammed into the sigil-covered walls and ricocheted in a hundred directions at once. The glass containers were the first to go, their liquid contents shooting up in noisome fountains just before they shattered. Shards flew everywhere like arrows; I covered my head with my arms and braced against the thousand bites of lancing pain where I was struck. But that wasn't nearly as bad as the fireball.

  I didn't know what it was at the time. It came too fast to comprehend. I heard a terrible deep booming above, like a huge hammer beating insanely upon a giant's drum. The sound was such that I thought my head would burst from it. I cowered and tried to turn into mist to escape it, but my body stubbornly held to its man-form. The energies tearing through the room must have disrupted my shape-changing ability. The vast, now out of control forces pressed me down against the hard floor as though to crush me to pulp, then atop that pressure came a wave of searing heat. It could not have lasted more than a second, but years might have passed in my perception of things.

  Then silence. Absolute silence. I was sure that I had gone deaf.

  When I finally dared to open my eyes to the present reality and move, the stillness was almost palpable, the air a thick, milky fog which rolled lazily about me. It was not the Mists of the borders, though, but rather steam rising from the escaped liquids where the last of them boiled away on the stone floor. With some relief I found that I could hear their bubbling hiss. My normal hearing was unaffected; it was my sense for magic that had been overburdened from the excess stimulation. My head rang from it, but I seemed otherwise unharmed. The many cuts I'd taken from the flying glass were healing, and I'd been spared from the horror of the fire by a special protective ring I always wore. As for the rest of the place…

  To describe the room as a shambles would have been a dreadful understatement The only thing standing was the round wall and the tower itself, all the rest was so smashed as to be past recognition. Anything that was wood was charred nearly to dust, broken splinters of glass were melted where they lay. The sigils were no longer bright silver, but tarnished blacker than midnight to match the smoke-painted walls. Above, the round window was gone, the lead that had held the vanished panes of glass in place still hot and dripping into the stone circle.

  I shakily sat up and looked around for Azalin. He hadn't made it through the opening. He hadn't made it at all.

  His body lay near the west wall where the energies must have flung him like a leaf in a windstorm. His clothing was torn and shredded, but that was the least of the damage. The explosion had apparently sucked the life right from him, leaving behind a desiccated husk. He most resembled one of my skeletal servers, but with only slightly more flesh clinging to his bones. I saw the pattern of his ribcage, the outlines of his shrunken heart and lungs, the knobs of his joints. His face was the worst, his hawk-like features shriveled and dried, lips drawn back from the teeth with death's universal grin, the flesh on his skull cracked like old parchment dotted with matted tufts of sparse hair. The stench of full blown decay filled the room, overpowering all others.

  There was no bringing him back. What few priests remained in Barovia had no power to restore life to the dead, and I had no spells that would help him. It would seem I would only have another servitor to add to my palace guard.

  Damnation. So much work and for nothing. What had gone wrong? The Mists. It must have been the damned Mists.

  Ever and always the source of my woes, the filthy stuff must have intervened and totally disrupted the workings of the spell. Azalin had advised me to perform a severance ceremony, but I'd chosen not to do so. I held to the idea that if I went through the portal, then Barovia would be dragged along as well in order to rejoin its original plane—if it had indeed even been the original plane. I had long suspected that many alternate realities existed, some varying greatly and some astonishingly similar. Azalin had met my theory of bringing Barovia with me with hearty contempt, but he was willing to allow me my way, having thought that at least he would be able to leave unhindered. Perhaps the world we had seen was so dissimilar to Barovia that they had somehow repelled one another. Perhaps I should not have been so stubborn. Damnation a thousand times over, I snarled to myself, furious, but weary right to my soul.

  I would have to start again. Tired as I was now, I knew I would make another attempt. Azalin had done a monumental job of research, laying groundwork I could use, only I would first have to trace through each step to find out exactly what had gone wrong. It might take months, even years without his help, but so be it, somehow I would—

  My disappointed and angry musings were interrupted when I heard a stirring from the direction of Azalin's body and turned to see what it was. My eyes widened and the hair on my neck rose.

  It was moving—the wretched, decaying thing was moving. I sat frozen still as stone from the shock and waited for him to start screaming, for he would have to be in unthinkable agony from what had happened to his body. No sound came from him, though, only the spidery scrabblings of his hands brushing the stone flags, and the scrape of his exposed bones. His movements were feeble, groggy, as mine had been a few moments earlier.

  Then the air about his withered body shimmered. The flesh clinging to his face filled out, became whole and healthy again. His features restored themselves back into their usual lines, though his eyes were shut. The skeletal body swelled to normalcy; the torn and dusty rags knitted themselves together, became rich velvets and furs once more, the leather of his belt and boots returned to looking new and supple.

  Appearance only. This was illusion, the one he so carefully and constantly maintained, and now I understood why. The realization of what I was watching slowly began to dawn upon me.

  Azalin was a lich, a thrice-damned lien.

  My first overpowering impulse was to destroy the thing. It was a threat far greater than any I had ever faced before, but I knew I was not even remotely prepared to attempt such a task. Had I been fully versed with my most powerful spells and weapons I might have had a chance against him, perhaps. But he was rapidly regaining full consciousness, and my next action would likely dictate whether I lived or died. My second impulse was for immediate self-preservation. I quietly lay back down and shut my eyes.

  It was the hardest thing I'd ever done, to lie there apparently stunned while not ten feet away what was now my worst enemy stirred itself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I had to make a conscious effort to remain absolutely still. Keeping every muscle utterly relaxed under the present circumstances required an astonishing amount of willpower when every instinct screamed at me to move. It was a true battle between reflex and resolution, and though precious instinct had saved me often in the past, this time I must not give in to basic impulse.

  I managed to hold quite still, inspired by the knowledge that if Azalin found out my deception he would instantly understand that I'd discovered his great secret. And that would be very bad for me.

  I heard more sounds from his area of the chamber, the brush of his bones against the stone floor, a ghostly groan. Whether it was an expression of physical or mental distress, I couldn't tell. Could such creatures feel bodily pain in the same sense as other beings? Never before having encountered such a powerful being, I did not know.

  After a few moments, I stirred and moaned and let my eyes flutter open in what I hoped would seem a normal manner. Now did I allow myself to look around, doing my best to recreate my initial reaction to the destruction, being careful not to overplay things. When my gaze fell upon Azalin, he was already getting to his feet.

  His illusion was firmly in place; he looked the same as ever, except for his gloves, which were gone. Probably torn or burned from his withered hands when—

  Stop that right now.

  If I started making mental comparisons between the illusion and what I knew to be reality, it would affect my behavior and be a giveaway to him. In all our time together, in all the recollections he'd passed to me, he hadn't once dropped the least hint of his true self, and quite wisely. Had I known, I would never have given him my shelter and protection and would have done my utmost to destroy him.

  Perhaps I wasn't animate in the same way as others, but I did retain a spark of true passion within me, and that made me a closer, more willing ally to the living than to this creature. Final death could still ultimately claim one such as myself, but a lich was already dead, a collection of bones existent by the foulest kind of dark magic and its own monumental determination to dwell beyond its normal span of years.

  While I still supped with pleasure from life's table, still held my place as a predator in the workings of the world, not so for a lich, who had given up all such pleasures, embracing and at the same time defying death itself for continuance, empty continuance. The cold revulsion Azalin inspired in all who came near him was quite justified.

  With all my contact with him I had grown used to that kind of cold, successfully ignoring it. The reaction I had now was not aversion to his physical form so much as the fact that when it came to magic, he as a lich was more than powerful enough to challenge me and win. Indeed, the only thing holding him back from such conquest must have been our bargain, the necessity of our having to work together. That could change, though. It might have changed already with this catastrophic failure. I had to play this out very carefully and not provide him with the least suspicion that his secret was no more, that I had realized my terrible vulnerability to him. His pretense must continue.

  Barovia was little enough, but all I had. It was also my only hope of seeing Tatyana live again. To save her, to save that which was mine, I would do anything, even take on the perilous task of trying to destroy Azalin.

  But I dared not surrender to that impulse just yet. This was not the time. Even had I been rested and ready for just such a confrontation, i still would have been hard pressed to overcome a being with Azalin's power.

  I stood—my limbs surprisingly steady after what I'd been through and what I was currently dealing with— and surveyed the damaged chamber with him. To continue the pretense that I was still ignorant of the truth I had to react as I would normally, which would be easy enough to emulate, for it was already boiling up inside.

  I fastened him with a stony gaze, trying to suppress my rising rage. "What went wrong?" I whispered.

  His eyes glowed red, untouched by the fading moonlight coming down from the shattered window. "I don't know yet."

  "You must have some idea."

  "As you must also."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I told you to make a severance with the land."

  "You cannot blame this disaster on such a flimsy detail."

  "You are the one who chose to blind himself to the facts, so yes, I may place the blame for it upon you. I said your tie to the land was too strong to be broken, and this more than proves me correct."