The battle raging in the heart of the school was rocking the ground. He picked his way carefully toward it. From the flare of light through the jagged, beautiful windows, he knew that it was centered where it had begun: in the great circular hall that still echoed the cry of the Founder’s name. He sensed suddenly, from the ease with which power was deflected away from the hall, that the battle was one-sided as yet. The Founder was toying with the wizards, using their lives as bait to lure Morgon to him. The next moment gave Morgon proof of that. He felt the Founder’s mind sweep across the flames like a black beacon, searching. He touched Morgon’s mind briefly: a familiar sense of dangerous, immense power yawned before him. But he did not try to hold Morgon. His mind withdrew, and Morgon heard a scream that made his blood run cold.

Aloil was being wrestled out of air into shape not far from him. He fought the dark pull over his mind with a desperate, furious intensity, but he could not free himself. His shape changed again, slowly. Great wind-twisted limbs pulled from his shoulders; his desperate face blurred behind oak bark, a dark hollow splitting the trunk where his mouth had been. Roots forked into the dead ground; his hair tangled into leafless twigs. A living oak stood on the grounds where nothing had grown for seven centuries. A lightning bolt of power seared toward it, to sunder it to the roots.

Morgon flung his mind open, encompassed it before it struck the tree. He threw it back at Ghisteslwchlohm, heard one of the walls explode. Then, reaching ruthlessly into the Founder’s stronghold, he joined their minds, as they had been joined before in the blackness of Erlenstar Mountain.

He absorbed the power that battered across his thoughts, letting it burn away at the bottom of his mind. Slowly his hold strengthened, until the Founder’s mind was familiar to him once more, as if it lay behind his own eyes. He ignored experiences, impulses, the long mysterious history of the Founder’s life, concentrating only on the source of his power, to drain it to exhaustion. He sensed the moment when Ghisteslwchlohm realized what he was doing, in the raw, frantic pulses of energy that nearly shook him loose again and again, until he forgot he possessed anything but a will and a mind at war with itself. The power-play stopped finally. He drew deeper, ferreting power and drawing it into himself, until the Founder yielded something to him unexpectedly: he found himself absorbing once more the knowledge of the land-law of Hed.

His hold faltered, broke in a wave of fury and revulsion at the irony. A chaotic flare of rage slapped him across the ground. He groped dizzily for shelter, but his mind could shape nothing but fire. The power broke through him again, sent him sprawling across burning rock. Someone pulled him off; the wizards, surrounding him, drew Ghisteslwchlohm’s attention with a swift, fierce barrage that shook the inner buildings. Talies, beating at his smoldering tunic, said tersely, “Just kill him.”

“No.”

“You stubborn farmer from Hed, if I survive this battle I am going to study riddlery.” His head turned suddenly. “There is fighting in the city. I hear death cries.”

“There’s an army of shape-changers. They came in the front gate while we were watching the back. I saw… I think I saw Yrth. Can he talk to crows?”

The wizard nodded. “Good. He must be fighting with the traders.” He helped Morgon to his feet. The earth rocked beneath them, sent him sprawling to the ground on top of Morgon. He shifted to his knees. Morgon rolled wearily to his feet and stood gazing at the shell of the hall. “He’s weakening in there.”

“He is?”

“I’m going in.”

“How?”

“I’ll walk. But I have to distract his attention…” He thought a moment, rubbing a burn on his wrist. His mind, scanning the grounds carefully, came to rest in the ancient, ruined library, with its hundreds of books of wizardry. The half-charred pages were still charged with power: with bindings woven into their locks, with unspoken names, with the energy of the minds that had scrawled all their experiences of power onto the pages. He woke that dormant power, gathered threads of it into his mind. Its chaos nearly overwhelmed him for a moment Speaking aloud, he spun a weird fabric of names, words, scraps of students’ grotesque spells, a tumult of knowledge and power that formed strange shapes in the flaring lights. Shadows, stones that moved and spoke, eyeless birds with wings the colors of wizards’ fire, shambling forms that built themselves out of the scorched earth, he sent marching toward Ghisteslwchlohm. He woke the wraiths of animals killed during the destruction: bats, crows, weasels, ferrets, foxes, shadowy white wolves; they swarmed through the night around him, seeking their lives from him until he sent them to the source of power. He had begun to work the roots of dead trees out of the earth when the vanguard of his army struck the Founder’s stronghold. The onslaught of fragments of power, clumsy, nearly harmless, yet too complex to ignore, drew the Founder’s attention. For a moment there was another lull, during which the wraith of a wolf whined an eerie death song. Morgon ran noiselessly toward the hall. He was nearly there when his own army fled back out of the hall, running around him and over him, scattering into the night toward the city.

Morgon flung his thoughts outward, herding the strange, misshapen creatures he had made back into oblivion before they terrorized Lungold. The effort of finding bats’ wraiths and shapes made out of clods of earth drained all his attention. When he finished finally, his mind spun again with names and words he had had to take back into himself. He filled his mind with fire, dissolving the remnants of power in it, drawing from its strength and clarity. He realized then, his heart jumping, that he stood in near-darkness.

An eerie silence lay over the grounds. Piles of broken wall still blazed red-hot from within, but the night was undisturbed over the school, and he could see stars. He stood listening, but the only fighting he heard came from the streets. He moved again, soundlessly, entered the hall.

It was black and silent as the caves of Erlenstar Mountain. He made one futile attempt to batter against the darkness and gave up. On impulse, he shaped the sword at his side and drew it. He held it by the blade, turned the eye of the stars to the darkness. He drew fire out of the night behind him, kindled it in the stars. A red light split across the dark, showed him Ghisteslwchlohm.

They looked at one another silently. The Founder seemed gaunt under the strange light, the bones pushing out under his skin. He voice sounded tired, neither threatening nor defeated. He said curiously, “You still can’t see in the dark.”

“I’ll learn.”

“You must eat darkness… You are a riddle, Morgon. You track a harpist all the way across the realm to kill him because you hated his harping, but you won’t kill me. You could have, while you held my mind, but you didn’t. You should try now. But you won’t. Why?”

“You don’t want me dead. Why?”

The wizard grunted. “A riddle-game… I might have known. How did you survive to escape from me that day on Trader’s Road? I barely escaped, myself.”

Morgon was silent. He lowered the sword, let the tip rest on the ground. “What are they? The shape-changers? You are the High One. You should know.”

“They were a legend here and there, a fragment of poetry, a bit of wet kelp and broken shell… a strange accusation made by a Ymris prince, until you left your land to find me. Now… they are becoming a nightmare. What do you know about them?”

“They’re ancient. They can be killed. They have enormous power, but they rarely use it. They’re killing traders and warriors in the streets of Lungold. I don’t know what in Hel’s name they are.”