Neither could Tramd see what treasure he had. He lay upon a bed of silk and satin, eyeless, his ruined body reeking, his limbs covered in scabrous flesh. His head tossed weakly, one side to another. Some time in the morning, servants must have lit incense and perfumed the air with oils. The incense was ash now, the oils not enough to cover the stench in the bedchamber of this mage who had fared so ruinously in his Tests of High Sorcery. Not even the breeze blowing in from the sea could do more than stir the stench.

"I see you, Tramd," Dalamar said, standing as near as he must and not minding the reek. "I see you."

The dwarf's head rolled from side to side, a blind man trying to place the speaker. His body quivered, but that was the trembling of his illness, not the will acting on muscle. Scabbed lips parted, and a line of spittle ran down this thin, patchy beard. He groaned, and the sound he made might have been a word. It might not have been. He had used his avatar's body in magic, but he had used his own strength as well.

Dalamar looked around and plucked a weapon from the wall, an axe with a fine, honed blade. He walked to the bed, his shadow on the dwarf.

"Do you feel me near, dwarf?"

The mage on the bed moaned. Silk coverings rustled. He could do no more.

"Now I think it a shame that you cannot see me. I think it a pity that you won't be able to look into my eyes when I kill you."

Outside in the corridor voices gathered, whispering. Servants had come, and soldiers, but no one ventured to cross the threshold. Softly, the hinges on the door creaked. Slowly, someone drew it closed. He had not been beloved, the master of this fortress. No one would interfere here. No one would challenge the mage who had come to kill their master.

Wind sighed across the window sill. The sea rushed to the shore far below and rushed out again. Somewhere a dragon's corpse floated, turning up, belly to the sky. Gulls would feed on that corpse, and sooner or later the sea would soften what even swords could not hurt. Then the gulls and fishes would pry the scales from the belly and pry the flesh from the bones.

"I will tell you," Dalamar said to the dying man on the bed, "what you have so dearly wanted to know. I have come to kill you, Tramd, and it will be my personal pleasure. You killed many good men and women in the battle for Silvanesti."

He stopped, watching the dwarf groan, watching his cracked lips bleed with his effort at speech. Standing there, Dalamar heard the forest burning. He heard the Wildrunners shouting. He heard a dragon dying, and the last prayer of a cleric who had put all his faith in gods who did not seem to know or care. Sunlight ran on the honed edge of the axe's blade, sliding down the curve as Dalamar shifted it from hand to hand.

"I have come in the name of Ladonna of the Tower of High Sorcery. I have come in the name of those who revere the High Art, the gift of the three magical children. I have come in my own name, Tramd Stonestrike, to remove you from the ranks of Her Dark Majesty's servants. There will be Light," he said, "and there will be Dark."

He lifted the axe higher, right over his head.

The dwarf heard the lifting, the sigh of air on the blade. He groaned and found a word. "No," he sobbed, "no."

"Yes," said Dalamar, very gently. "Yes."

He let fall the axe, a headsman, an executioner come to avenge early deaths and late.

"Yes," he said to the dead man. "There will be balance."

Dalamar put back the axe, the blood still running. He rolled the corpse to the floor and snatched up a sheet from the bed. With the silk he wrapped up the head, the eyes still staring, the ruined mouth still gaping.

"My lord," said one, a human woman, bowing to him as she spoke. "What is your will?"

He looked at her, and she cringed from his glare. "Go," he said, and he didn't care if she took the word to mean she must leave him alone or she must go out from the citadel and never come back. They made, servants and soldiers, the choice they had wanted to make for long years. They fled.

Dalamar didn't watch them. Their running footsteps meant nothing to him. He carried the head of Tramd o' the Dark, wrapped in bloody silk, back to the chamber where he had left Regene. She lay dead, her blue eyes wide, her lips a little parted. He knelt beside her, brushed her dark hair from her face, and he closed her eyes. He stayed that way for a time, listening to people flee the castle. Then he lifted her in his arms, took up the proof of the dwarf mage's death, and spoke a word of magic.

The floor fell away. The walls fell away. In the grip of the transport spell, Dalamar Nightson shouted, and this time he didn't cry a spell. This time he shouted a curse.

Out on the ocean, as far as the rim of the Blood Sea of Istar, sailors pointed north and they pointed east. A great fire burned on the Worldscap Mountains on Karthay. The flames of it reached as high as the tallest peak, then higher still. The smoke of the burning roiled out over the sea, darkening the day to dusk.

Epilogue

Dalamar walked through light and through darkness, up a winding stone staircase that seemed to have no end. Once he looked back over his shoulder, and he could not see the steps behind. They were lost in shadow and the fitful flaring of the torches upon the wall. He had no hand-light, for something had been done to dampen his magic. In the pit of his belly, fear fluttered.

The darkness of Shoikan Grove had not frightened him. He had walked beneath trees whose limbs were arms reaching down to grab him, through shadows where disembodied eyes glared at him. Beneath his feet, twigs had turned to skeletal hands, those hands plucking at the hem of his robe, but he had not faltered. Not even when ghosts came wandering out from the depths of that haunted wood did he allow himself fear. He had entered the precincts of the Tower of High Sorcery at Palanthas as boldly as though he were walking into his own home. The lightless courtyard, the great doors that opened of their own accord, even the soft, almost gentle voice, that bade him, "Enter, apprentice," did not disconcert him. But now, here, without his magic, Dalamar felt fear.

It is but an effect of his magic, he told himself as he went ever upward. He will not permit my magic, and so that is what must be. Here is the road I have chosen, and it has wound all the way from Silvanost to Palanthas. This is the road I will trust.

"Shalafi," he whispered, trying out the title, the Elvish word for "master." "It will be as you wish."

Up through the darkness and the light he went, never missing a step, though so many lay hidden in shadow and not all were of the same depth or breadth. No rail warded the unwary climber. A fall from this staircase would be a killing plunge, and yet it seemed to Dalamar that he'd found the rhythm of the uneven steps in the first moment he began his ascent. The higher he went the quicker his pulse-the old feeling he'd always known when he wandered from the safe ways, the quiet paths.

He came to a landing and passed it by. He did not know how or why, but he understood that he must keep climbing. Now as he went, a feeling of having been here before stirred in him, as though he had been to this place long ago. He had not been here in all his life, but still the feeling persisted.

His footfalls echoed from the walls, those echoes falling into the well below and whispering back up again, as though he were being followed. The hair raised up on the back of his neck; it prickled on his arms. Dalamar shivered, but he would not stop. He must go on, up and up and around the long spiral. He passed another landing, and when he glanced left, he saw a corridor brightly lit, the torches on the walls glimmering into the distance. Door after door he glimpsed, all shut tight, and yet he had the feeling that these rooms were occupied. By whom?