None of this did Dalamar say to Regene, for whatever she professed of the shape of her own ambition, his was to please Ladonna with the completion of her mission. He would not chance it that this would look to Regene like a good way to add to her body of work. He would use her as she offered, but he would do no more.

After that, the two mages spoke only of ways to get to Karthay, and they did not deliberate long. They chose the wings of magic over the white-winged sails of ships that would take them over the sea. They left on the morning of the next day, and each thought, Well, I know how far I'll trust this one, and that far should get me what I want.

Chapter 19

Dalamar stood on the shore of a grim isle. The groaning of the sea and the weary sigh of waves against the rocky shore filled the gray dawn. He looked from the cheerless sky to where Regene walked toward a broad arm of stone thrust out from the land. All around lay bleached bones, shattered skulls, and the wretched shards of once proud keels. These were not the remains of one shipwreck but many. They were not friendly harbors, the stony shores of Karthay. Hardly anyone put into them on purpose. Few who found themselves flung here by storm or chased by the pirates who haunted Mithas and her sister isle Kothas lived to bemoan their fate. Here was Karthay, that isle where the dark dwarf lived.

Regene stopped in her walking and waved him down the beach. He went, picking his way over stones, kicking aside bones. When he rounded the promontory, he saw that a road met the beach perhaps a quarter-mile away. Broad and smooth, it led in winding stages up the mountainside to where a towered citadel crowned the high peak. No magic warded the road, no traps, no barriers were erected. But then, why should there be? Somewhere near, on one of the lesser peaks behind the citadel, a dragon the color of blue steel lurked. He had seen it in Ladonna's magic-wrought map, and he remembered her warning.

High in the sky, gulls creaked, their gray wings and white backs catching the first glimmer of the day. Regene looked up to the crags rising above the sea. Her cheeks, always known to him as rosy and plump, shone pale now.

"Do you feel it?" she whispered. He had to step closer to hear her. "Do you feel it, Dalamar?"

He stood still, extending his senses, reaching in magic all around the isle, up to the sky, down to the sea, around the stone and mountains.

"Feel what?"

She shuddered. "It's been a long time since I've been outside the Tower. We are all calm in there, a peaceful lot. We study, and we observe the courtesy of the Master's hospitality." She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. "And-you may have noticed-though Black Robes and White Robes and Red practice their magic, spin their spells, work their charms and talismans, we don't much feel the… the intrusion of another Order's sorcery. I feel it here, though, Black magic like claws raking my skin."

"Interesting." Dalamar looked up the hill to the towered citadel. "Hadn't you considered that?"

"I did," she said. "I just didn't think one place could hold so much evil." She looked at him along the length of her shoulder, eyeing him. He saw her re-thinking him, looking back to two nights in his bed, to conversations in his rooms. He saw her recognize him. "I hadn't thought," she said, not marveling and not afraid, "that you were part of this."

Dalamar shrugged. "I am what I am, Regene. Part of the dark, as you are part of the light. One, I think, is no better or worse than the other."

Her sapphire eyes widened, just for an instant, as though she heard blasphemy. Then, swiftly she said, "Yes, of course. We know that, we mages."

Cold wind ran down the road, down the hill to the sea. "But outside the world of the Tower," Dalamar said, "where theory meets the hard bones of the world, what we know is not so pretty as it once seemed, is it?"

She didn't answer. He nodded, and he didn't waste time wondering whether he had been foolish to bring her on this journey. In the instant he determined that she showed a sign of failing him, he would cast her aside as a warrior the weapon whose blade was chipped, whose grip was cracked.

You have visitors, said the dragon, the blue whose name was Blade.

On a bed of silks and satin, in a chamber high above the sea, a dwarf groaned, his mouth a ruin of split lips and bleeding gums, his teeth rotted, his flesh scaled. His beard hung in white tatters. His skull shone gray through patches of stringy hair. In his mind, an image flashed, dragon-sent to this one who could see nothing outside his own window. A dark elf walked upon the shore, heading for a White-robed mage not far ahead. He knew them! He had felt the dark elf's hatred days before in the library, but he hadn't thought it would amount to more than the wrath of a pup who had no chance at him. The White Robe, he knew her, too.

He did not rage; he did not fall into fear. Tramd o' the Dark was one who long knew how the stars were patterned and what those patterns meant. A diviner, he could read hearts and minds. He understood how mages thought, how power ran. Best of all, he understood how swiftly the winds of politics can drop into calms and deflate the sails of the powerful with no more warning than a simple announcement.

You have visitors.

These two were Tower-sent. He knew it because he knew they were not minions of the Blue Lady, and no one else hated him enough to dare his citadel. Well enough, he thought, let them come, and let them try their luck. The winds are not so calm yet, and we may be able to work up a storm here.

In the Tower of High Sorcery at Wayreth, the avatar walked out from the library, down the long stairs and through the rear tower to the courtyard. Past the beds of herbs and vegetables, he went into the outer tower and into the laboratory where people were used to seeing this wight they knew as Tramd. It closed the heavy oaken door and flung down the bar. It walked to a long table, to the wide expanse of black marble. There it stood, just for a moment, still as breathless night. Then it filled up its chest with air, spoke one word of command in the deep voice all the Tower folk had known as Tramd's. The word spoken, the breath expelled, and the avatar collapsed. It fell to dust, not more than the clothing it wore remained. In the morning, it would be said that the dwarf had killed himself with some carelessness at his work. Now, no one knew, no one missed him.

At the same time, in Karthay, where the breezes blew in chill from the sea and the first gray light of dawn leaked into the shadowed chamber, the dwarf mage came to himself, blind, rotting, and filled up with pain as his mind inhabited the ruin of his body. He forced his lungs to fill with air. He let that air go again, seeping, and on the breath one word drifted, a word of command. In the shadows behind his bed something lurched, stiff-legged and jerky. Like moonlight sparkling on a dark sea, the mind of the mage went into the clay of a new avatar. Again a dwarf, but this time his hair gleamed red as copper, his eyes blue as the sea. He had the broad shoulders of a forgeman, the scarred hands, the keen eye that knew how to look into the heart of fire and see how well his iron was faring.

Said the mage with the voice of the avatar, the dwarf to the dragon, "Where are they?"

On the road up.

"Get rid of them," he said, and he went to the window to watch the dragon lift off, the wide wings spread, sun running on blue scales. The red eye of the beast gleamed as he opened his jaws wide to roar. Light glinted off fangs as long as Tramd's arm. A sense of bloodlusty anticipation filled his mind as Blade soared out over the island, the sound of his eagerness rebounding from the peaks and all the towers of the citadel.