The sun was beginning to sink toward the western horizon and the light had taken on the thick amber hue of late afternoon when the Harper guided her horse next to Caledan and Mista.

"So how are you feeling, scoundrel?" she asked him. The wind blew her thick dark hair from her shoulders, the sunlight setting its auburn highlights afire.

"You'd better be careful, Harper," Caledan said wryly. "That sounds dangerously like concern in your voice."

She started to nudge her mount away, but he reached out to grab the bridle of her chestnut gelding. Their horses came to a stop. The others riding ahead seemed not to notice. "I just wanted to say… I just wanted to say thanks for worrying about me, all right? It's been a long while since anyone's really done that"

Mari was silent for a long moment. Finally a smile touched the corners of her lips. "Don't mention it, scoundrel." She nudged her mount's flanks, and the chestnut broke into a trot, catching up with the others. Caledan followed after.

"I don't know, Mista," he said to his mount as they rode. "There's simply no understanding women sometimes." The gray mare snorted, giving a sudden sharp kick, and Caledan had to clutch her mane tightly to keep from being thrown out of the saddle.

'Traitor!" he said through clenched teeth. "You females always stick together, don't you?" The gray tossed her pretty head in defiance, and Caledan swore under his breath. That was all he needed-another headstrong female to make his life miserable.

Thirteen

The lord steward Snake slipped the dim crystal into its velvet-lined box. His servant, the shadevar, had just made a disturbing report. Snake was going to have to take action, and he would need Ravendas's help. But first he had to decide how much to tell her.

He paced across his private chamber to a window high in the tower of the city lord and gazed out over the night-mantled city. A thousand lights glowed below him. This was the time of evening when Snake felt most alert and alive. The sunlight only caused him pain of late, and during the hours of brightness he felt constantly weary, his mind dulled. He hated the daytime. It had been that way ever since his ascent upward from the sewers below Iriaebor.

He closed his eyes, and for a moment he was back in the sewers, crawling through the dank pipes and foul-smelling Passageways.

After escaping the dungeons, he had fallen, and the fall left his body broken and dying. But then he had made a bargain and become whole-no, more than whole. The blood sang through his veins, and a strange tingling in his fingers bespoke his new power. He remembered journeying in the darkness beneath the city, wondering what had happened to him in that cavernous, crimson-lit chamber deep in the heart of the Tor.

This is impossible, Snake, he recalled saying to himself over and over. You should be dead. Dead! You are going mad…

But gradually another voice had intruded on his thoughts, growing in power, drowning out his panic. It was the voice that had spoken to him when he lay dying at the chasm's edge. Now the voice whispered in his ear, giving him understanding, purpose-reminding him of the bargain. Eventually his own thoughts drifted into nothingness. After that the voice was everything.

Finally he had crawled through a sewer grate into a dank alley of the Old City. Though the daylight was dim and gray, it seared his eyes all the same. He had been down in the blackness below for too long. He cowered in a shadowed alcove until twilight. Then he moved through the city streets once again.

He was desperately hungry. Once he had been a thief, and that instinct still pulsed within him. He came upon a baker who was just closing his shop, and slipped inside. Just as he confronted the rotund baker, he realized he had no weapon. But his hand moved instinctively. The baker's shout of protest was silenced in a dying gurgle as a livid bolt of emerald brilliance crackled from Snake's fingertips. The green fire burned a hole through the man's heart. The baker slumped to the floor with a look of horror on his face.

Snake stared at his hand. It was unmarked by the fire. The tingling of power was stronger now. His head spun as if he were drunk. Slowly a smile spread across his face. Then he stepped over the baker's body, picked out several loaves of bread, and began to eat. All the while the voice whispered in his ear…

A cool breeze blew through the window, its touch bringing the lord steward Snake back to the present. He looked at his hands resting on the windowsill. The power in them had grown over the last two years. And the voice still spoke to him. It was the voice that had told him to seek out Ravendas when she came to Iriaebor. It had told him how to make himself useful to her, how to help her gain control of the city. Snake had never questioned the voice. The voice was always right.

Snake cocked his head, as if listening to a far-off sound. His dark eyes shone dully, like two black stones. Yes, even now it was telling him what to do. He must hurry to see Lord Ravendas.

He found her in her chamber, reclining languidly on a velvet-covered lounge in a robe of silk as pale as her alabaster skin.

"My lord, I must speak with you," Snake said in his sibilant voice.

"You are disturbing my rest, my lord steward," she said with irritation.

Snake's reptilian face remained expressionless. "It is important, my lord."

Ravendas glared at him, then abruptly stood. She moved to a table and poured herself a goblet of red wine from a crystal decanter. She drained it. "Well?" she demanded.

Snake moved closer to her, his green robe hissing like a serpent's scales against the marble floor. "Caldorien has left the city, my lord. Five travel with him, one of them the Harper."

The goblet crashed against a wall, breaking into tiny shards of glass. "Is that so?" Ravendas said with perfect calmness. "Caledan and his precious Fellowship-I should have known they would still be following him like a band of drooling puppies. Tell me, my lord steward, where are they journeying?"

“To the Fields of the Dead, my lord. That can only mean one thing. Somehow they must have found a copy of the Mal'eb'dala we did not know about They must have learned about the Nightstone, and now they seek to discover the shadow song to counter its magic."

Ravendas laughed, a sound like breaking glass. "Let them try, my lord steward. I doubt they will fare any better than we. They will be unpleasantly surprised by what they find in the Fields of the Dead. And meanwhile we shall continue our excavations." She reclined upon the lounge once again. "Caldorien is more a fool than ever."

"Shall I send a party of your men after them, anyway, my lord?"

"Very well." A secret, wicked smile curled itself about Ravendas's lips. "But remember, my lord steward-I want Caldorien alive. The rest you may do with as you please, but Caldorien must not be slain."

Snake backed from the room, leaving her alone. He made his way down the tower's central staircase to give the orders for an attack party to ride hard to the Fields of the Dead. As Ravendas wished, he would instruct them to capture Caldorien alive.

But the shadevar had no such orders. A smile like the blade of a knife made a slash across Snake's severe visage.

The little room high in the city lord's tower was dark and quiet. Kellen lay in his bed, covered by fine woolen blankets. But he was not asleep. He was waiting. He clung tightly to a small wooden soldier. It was a crudely carved toy, dressed in a torn cloth napkin of royal blue. One of the servants had made it for him, a kind old man who had looked at him sadly when he learned Kellen had no toys other than the exquisite musical instruments his mother gave to him. Mother had ordered the old servant put to death when she learned of the gift, but she had let Kellen keep the toy.