Ransome laughed silently.
If you’ve come all the way from Nammerin into this place, then you’ve passed a harder test than anything I would have set for you.
Then do you give me mastery?
I give you nothing
, Ransome said.
You have claimed it, and it is yours
. The Adept Master laughed again—no sound, only a troubling of the dark air.
And I see that the Mages have set themselves a greater task than they thought, since you are free. But if you are willing, there is something more.
Owen bowed his head.
Command me.
No. You are Adept now, not apprentice. What you do must be of your own choosing.
Then I choose to serve,
said Owen.
Tell me what needs to be done.
There was a terrible joy in Errec Ransome’s eyes.
For this I trained you, for this I kept you from the destruction that I knew would come. Go to the Retreat. Your staff is there. Claim it, and become the Master of the Guild.
Owen drew back, shaken.
I did not ask …
But it is given.
And if I fail?
Ransome closed his eyes, as if the strength to hold them open were failing him.
Then the Adepts have no leader; our sun is set; and Lord sus-Airaalin has conquered. sus-Airaalin?
Owen felt a tremor go through him at the name.
But I saw him … .
The Adept Master paid no heed to his unvoiced question.
You should go,
Errec Ransome said.
It isn’t safe for you to be here. But I have looked into the future and have seen how it lies. You will be the Master of the Guild when the Mages threaten us no longer.
It was a dismissal. Obediently, Owen allowed himself to drift away, passing like a bodiless ghost through decks and conduits until he seemed to float in open space above a planet. He let himself fall downward through the upper air onto the surface of his homeworld.
After the painstaking transit through darkness from Nammerin, his progress to the Retreat was simple and almost effortless. Guided by his knowledge of the world’s geography, and increasingly by the feeling of wrongness and evil coming from his goal, he floated cloudlike through the middle atmosphere until he came to the Retreat.
He knew what to expect when he came close to his destination, but what he saw sickened and angered him just the same. Within the walls of the Retreat, the courtyard was blackened and cratered. Black-robed and masked Mages stood there, and they tended fires. The fires burned the books and furnishings of the Retreat, they burned the broken staves of Adepts, and they burned bodies as well.
I should have been here
, Owen thought, as he had protested aloud to Klea on Nammerin.
These are my people; I should have been with them.
He knew that Klea had been right, that he couldn’t have stopped an invasion single-handed. But he still felt an overpowering sadness as he passed over the courtyard, and its flagstones puddled with drying blood. Forcing himself to go onward, he entered the main building, and walked through halls he knew well toward his old room. That was the place to start the search.
And there, indeed, was his staff, leaning against the far corner, as if he had never been away. Now to put his hand upon it, and somehow bring the physical object through the vast distance to Nammerin—if such a thing was possible.
Before he could touch it, he became aware of someone else inside the room. A Mage. And like the stranger on his mother’s terrace, this one seemed able to see him even in his noncorporeal state. Owen shuddered; from the dark familiarity of this one’s aura, he was facing the same Magelord who had held him pinned down in Flatlands for more than two seasons.
“You’ve come,” the Mage said. “We were certain you would. Now you can follow me to the Void, and die.”
The Mage crossed the room in a stride, snatched up the staff, and gestured toward Owen. With his movement the room vanished, to be replaced by a dull grey place, skyless and groundless, and Owen knew that his worst fears had come to pass.
This was the Void, where all of an Adept’s skills were useless, where reality itself was unreal, where the very nonsubstance of this nonplace leached power and strength away. And there in the Void the Magelord turned, and laid down Owen’s staff at his feet.
“Come to me, Adept. Take back your staff if you can. Here you will be destroyed.”
As soon as Llannat was alone again in the berthing compartment, she sat up in the bunk and looked around for her clothes. Somewhat unnervingly, she found them hung over the back of the only chair in the compartment, just as she always dealt with them when she got ready for bed.
Judging from that, and from what Vinhalyn had said to her a minute or so earlier, she must have put herself to bed in here—after walking about the ship and speaking to people in what must have seemed to be a normal fashion.
She shivered.
If I’m going to be doing things like this a lot, I’d really like to know about them at the time.
Her preferences, she knew, weren’t likely to count for much. She got out of bed and dressed, then headed for the Deathwing’s cockpit.
Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter
was still cruising in hyperspace when she arrived.
“I’ll be doing the dropout,” she said.
The pilot looked at her curiously. “But you don’t know the systems … .”
“I said I’ll be doing the dropout.”
Llannat let her fingers trace over the control panels along the patterns she had seen herself use in her trance.
This one first, and then the others in the sequence … .
“Hey!” said the pilot. “That’s not the way it says in the manuals!”
She kept working. “The manuals are incomplete,” she said, speaking from the memories she had shared, trying not to think of what that other self had done in this very place. “The code for disarming the self-destruct was a matter of personal instruction only, as a final safeguard against having captured ships used by the enemy.”
“I … see,” said the pilot, as the dropout process ended and the stars reappeared around them.
Llannat straightened and stepped back from the control panels. “Where are we?” she asked.
“Gyffer system.”
“Gyffer? Not Galcen?”
Again the pilot looked startled. “It’s where you told us to go, Mistress. Don’t you remember?”
Llannat shook her head. “It’s not important. I’m going back to my quarters now; when
Naversey
arrives, let me know.”
Owen felt his strength draining away wherever the grey mist of the Void drifted against him. Whatever happened next would have to happen quickly—he couldn’t live here long.
How can the Mages endure it?
But Owen’s black-robed adversary was living, standing like a statue with a glowing staff in his hand. The staff’s red aura flickered off the black mask that hid his features.
“Are you the Master of your Circle?” Owen asked the Mage. He circled as he spoke, looking for position. The Mage turned to follow him throughout. “For if you are not …”
Between one word and the next Owen dived through the nonsubstance of the Void toward his staff. He reached for it, trying to call it into his hands. The Mage’s ebony rod slammed him in the ribs as he rolled to his feet, and he felt a bone crack under the blow.
Worse, his move had taken him into the fog, and now his strength was waning further. With the last of his momentum he sprang straight up, letting the edge of his foot fly out at the Mage’s head.
The Mage ducked under the kick and brought his staff around in a blazing circle against Owen’s knee. All the strength fled from the limb in a hot splash of pain, and Owen went down. The grey, soul-draining mist swirled around him. He struggled again to his feet.
“Now you will die here,” the Mage said. “But see, I bring friends and family to play with you in the time that remains.”
The Mage gestured with his free hand, and shapes arose from the mist: Beka in her guise as Tarnekep Portree; Owen’s brother, Ari; the General and the Domina; Master Ransome. All pale and expressionless, with cold and lifeless eyes, and the flesh sloughing from their bones to reveal the skeletons underneath.
“Come, embrace your kind,” the Mage said.
“They’re all illusion.”
“Are they?”
The phantasmal Beka reached forth one rotting hand and brushed Owen’s cheek. Pain followed her touch, burning and chilling him at once. Owen reacted by punching straight into the creature’s face—but nothing resisted him, and his fist exploded into pain as the unreal face deformed like smoke.
“Not quite illusion,” the Mage replied, laughing behind his mask. “And real enough for what I do.”
But Owen noticed that his enemy was breathing hard, and that under the mask his jaw was set and tense.
So this place does take something out of the Mages as well. In that case
—Owen dropped straight down, throwing himself flat, and rolled through the grey mist. He felt a burning pain in his midsection as he passed through another of the phantom figures, and then he was away.
Ahead of me, and to the right. My staff is there.
Owen tried to call it to him, but nothing responded. “An
Adept’s skills count for nothing in the Void.
” Had he heard that lecture once, long ago, or had he given it himself? He didn’t dare breathe; taking a breath would draw the grey mist into his lungs, and that would be the end of him.
He struck something solid—the Mage’s leg—and grasped it, whipping around in a wrestler’s throw and pulling his adversary down into the mist with him. The Mage’s staff struck him low on the hips, but the blow lacked strength. Owen drove his elbow into his opponent’s belly and was rewarded with the sound of an explosive gasp.
Owen slid his left hand up the Mage’s arm to grab the other man’s staff. His right hand was still numb from punching his sister’s phantom double. The ebony rod was glowing and hot to the touch. Owen seized it, rolling as he did so to bring the Mage over on top of him.
Now the Mage’s back was pressed tight against his chest. He crossed his right arm over his left to hook the other end of the Mage’s staff. And then he pulled.
The short staff pressed inward against the Mage’s throat. The black-robe struggled, trying to pull Owen’s hands free, reaching down and striking Owen’s ribs, smashing his head backward into Owen’s face.
Owen felt an explosion of pain as his nose broke and the hot blood ran down over his mouth and chin. His lungs were burning. He hadn’t dared to breathe since he’d gone down below the mist. He pulled back more sharply on the Magelord’s staff.
The Mage convulsed. The vertebrae in his neck snapped, and he fell still. Owen rolled from beneath the suddenly inert shape and swept out with his left hand.
There.
He pulled his staff to him and used it as a prop to lever himself upright. If this was victory, he reflected, it wasn’t likely to do him any good. The featureless fog stretched as far as his vision extended. He was tired—if not for his staff, he would have collapsed—and he had no idea how to get home.
Then a dark mound stirred where the Mage had fallen. It rose, and stood upright. The Mage.
Owen brought his staff to guard, and white witchlight flickered down its length. But the Mage neither attacked him nor spoke. Instead, the dark figure turned and ran away, and Owen ran after. His legs hurt, his lungs hurt, and his side ached where the ends of the broken rib grated together—but wherever the black-robed phantom was going now, he was Owen’s last remaining link with reality.
A shape appeared before them, a pointed archway of impenetrable shadow. The Mage pulled ahead, fell into the blackness, and was gone. Owen followed him into the dark.
By the white glow of his staff he saw that he had come into a rough stone passage, one that he recognized from the Retreat, a corridor deep underground. Doorways lined both sides of the passage. He felt himself being drawn forward and to the right, to a rough wooden door with a pull-ring in the center. He pulled, and took a step forward—
—into a windowless room lit by an opaline glow-globe, where cool air sighed and rattled through the vents in the floor. A young woman with a staff in her hand slept leaning against a wall. On the far side of the room was a wide bed with an ugly green coverlet. Owen was filled with the desire to sleep. He walked forward, staggering in his fatigue, and lay down with his staff beside him.
Much later, he opened his eyes. Klea was bending over him, cleaning the dried blood from his face with a damp cloth.