Plainsman and dwarf, they were the same man.

Dalamar stopped, only then realizing that he trembled with rage. He stood a long, slow breath, and he saw that the door into the Hall of Mages stood slightly ajar. Inside, the Head of his Order waited, Ladonna who had bid him come here. She had a matter to take up with him. Whatever it was, he would not let her see him as he now stood, pale with rage. He took a breath, only one, and closed his eyes, focusing inward until his mind calmed and his heart no longer beat to the drums of his rage. When he was again still, he put his hand on the door to the Hall of Mages. His lightest touch caused it to shiver, just a little, and to swing slowly, silently inward.

Dalamar looked swiftly around the high dark chamber. He had a sense that it was a cavernous place, stretching wide and reaching high. Even as he did, he understood that it was not nearly so large as it seemed. The light made the illusion, the pale glow seeping down from the ceiling.

Dark as shadows, Ladonna stood before a tall wooden chair, one of three arranged in semi-circle, beyond which nineteen others formed an embracing crescent. One tall granite seat stood so that whoever sat there could look out upon all. To this one, Ladonna had her back, and her hand upon the arm of the mahogany chair seemed white as bone in the strange, unwavering light.

"My lady, I have come as you commanded."

She turned and looked at him through narrowed eyes. He felt her regard like the touch of a cold hand. He did not flinch, even when she said, "You have seen him."

Dalamar nodded, just once. "I have."

"Good. Now come in. There is a thing you and I must talk about."

You have seen him. Good. How, good? Why, good? Curiosity compelled him. Dalamar went deeper into the hall, and as he walked, it seemed to him that the very air was shivering, that the stone floor beneath his feet shifted. He kept his stride, looking neither up nor down.

"I'm making a map, Dalamar Nightson. Come in, and come closer."

She waved her hand again, a languid gesture that caught the pale light from above in the facets of her ringed fingers and trailed it through the air in colors of sapphire and ruby and emerald. Those light trails were like threads, and with these she wove her map upon the gray stone floor. Towers rose up in the middle of the floor, towers as tall as his shoulder, and these warded a dark castle that sat upon the highest peak of a mountain dominating an island. On the next peak, one only a little smaller, a dragon lay coiled in the warmth of the day, sunlight glinting like bright arrows from its talons and steel-blue scales. Ladonna waved her hand again, and now the light of diamonds depicted water shimmering on the floor, the Courrain Ocean and, just outside the embrace of the Isles of Karthay, Mithas and Kothas, a roiling of water like a wound forever unhealing.

"The Blood Sea of Istar," Ladonna said. She smiled a little, and darkly. "You have lately seen what used to stand in that place in the days before the Cataclysm."

In his Tests he had, in the dreamscape where he'd chosen to let Lorac Caladon take a dragon orb from the Tower of Istar. That orb plunged the fairest kingdom of the world into nightmare. He had weighed in the balance the fate of the beloved kingdom and the strictures of High Sorcery, which command that no one may interfere with a mage in his Tests. He had chosen, as he always had, for sorcery, and he would not show sign of regret or sorrow to this woman whose eyes watched him so coldly. Still, and he could not help it, Dalamar looked south and west from the Blood Sea, and without thinking his eye went to find Silvanesti. This magical map did not show it, and in his heart his most private voice whispered his deepest sorrow: No road leads home for you, not even those drawn on maps.

"My lady," he said, turning his eyes from the place he could not see or ever go, turning his mind from the pain to the moment. "Why are you showing me this castle in Karthay?"

And what does this have to do with your satisfaction that I have seen the dwarf mage and he me?

She looked at him long, her gaze keen with reckoning.

"Listen to me, Dalamar Nightson, and learn this well: You have lived through the War of the Lance, you know that gods work ever in the world with mortals as their instruments and weapons, and you know, for you are no fool, that they have not stopped striving, no matter what treaties mortals have inked among themselves."

Dalamar folded his hands inside the wide sleeves of his dark robe, waiting.

"There are gods, however, who forbear to play this game. You know them, too. They are the three magical children, the gods of High Sorcery. They cherish balance above all things, and we who practice their Art know that if the balance between the three spheres fails…"

Dalamar shuddered. "Then magic will fail."

She lifted a hand to tuck back a small wisp of her silver hair. Gems sparked on her fingers, dazzling. "Exactly. Let Paladine and Takhisis play at war, let Gilean watch and record all in sublime impartiality-no matter to them if balance fails. But we who walk on sorcery's way must always strive to keep the balance of light and dark so that our magic may survive. Did not Istar show us that?"

"My lady, no one knows how precious the balance better than a dark elf. You tell me what I already know."

She raised a brow, one cool brow, and he fell silent. In the silence nothing stirred, not even the image of the map on the floor; it was as though the oceans she'd drawn had frozen, as though the towers she'd raised hung in the very moment between the lash of the earthquake and the rumbling of stone.

"Well," she said in a voice that raised the hair on the back of his neck, "let me see, master mage, if I can tell you something you don't know. This balance we cherish has fallen into danger of tipping." Her eyes narrowed, glittering and dangerous. "The one who works to overweight the scales is that mage you met recently in the library"-her lips moved in a cruel smile-"a mage whom you know from other days."

Boldly he spoke, for there was only one other way to speak, and that was in fear. Not now, not ever. "The mage I knew in other days, my lady, was a tall Plainsman, a barbarian in red armor who rode upon a crimson dragon. The mage I saw today is a dwarf."

"Yes, and if you see him again outside this Tower, you might see not a Plainsman or a dwarf. You might not see a man, but a lovely woman or a child. His name, the one his parents gave to him in Thorbardin, is Tramd Stonestrike. He is known to most others as Tramd o' the Dark. We spoke, lately, you and I, about the marks a mage's Test can leave on him. This one's Test left him a rotting ruin, blind, incapable of leaving his bed, of feeding himself or keeping himself clean. All he has left to him is his mind and magic."

"A mind," Dalamar said, suddenly understanding, "that he sends abroad in avatars."

"Yes. He is a wanderer, one who seeks everywhere for the spell or the talisman or the artifact that will restore him to health. You met him in Silvanesti because he had come upon a way to facilitate his search-he attached himself to the army of the Highlord Phair Caron. He went through all the lands she conquered, searching for the magic he needs. After the war, he walked through the world he helped to wound, still searching. At times, he turns up here, checking the libraries and the records rooms."

"He has not, it seems, been successful wherever he searches."

"He hasn't. But he has found another Highlord to serve, and she most certainly has made promises to him, promises he has chosen to trust. She is the Blue Lady."

The Blue Lady, that one who sat even now in Sanction, waiting for her chance to begin the war anew for the Dark Queen, she whose forces filled Neraka. Her title rang like the clash of distant swords in the chamber, echoing. She was, he knew, the sister of the mage who had broken the Nightmare gripping Silvanesti.