The masked witches

He tried to lift his hand and found that he could. The crystal s glow made the extremity s gray, flat counterpart slide up the wall.

I m still alive, Dai Shan thought, and still myself. A wild laugh tried to bubble up from the center of him, and he smothered it as dignity required.

He resolved that however urgent the need, he wouldn t bring any more shadows to life for a tenday. Happily, that ability was only one of his strengths. He possessed many others, including the physical vitality that returned to him quickly.

He stood up and said, Change.

The shadows did, instantly, and suddenly it was like peering into three mirrors, except that each of the reflections stood in a different attitude, none of them precisely matching their creator s stance. Their thoughts and perceptions stabbed into his own, overlaying his awareness with jumble and cacophony, and he exerted his will to block them out. He didn t want to live through any of them as he d lived through the agent that first made contact with Falconer. Rather, he wanted to multiply his i

When the intrusions had faded, and his mind had cleared, he stepped up to the barrier and put his hands on it. His counterparts did the same. Then they all began to shove.

The wall stood as solid as a mountainside.

With his jaw clenched and sweat sliding down his face, Dai Shan shoved harder. He focused on the action until he became it. Until he no longer remembered why he d undertaken it, nor cared about its success or failure. All that mattered was its perfect articulation.

The surface under his palms shivered, then shifted. With a scraping, banging clatter, a tier of stones fell inward.

With their purpose accomplished, Dai Shan s shadows withered from existence in quick succession. Their creator listened for any indication that the sound of the breach had attracted attention. Except for the thump of his own heartbeat in his ears, the cellars were silent.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Plucking a silk handkerchief from his sleeve, he used it to dab first the sweat from his face and neck and then the drops of blood from the scrapes on his palms. Then he picked up the crystal and climbed through the hole.

On the other side, a staircase descended deeper into the earth. As he stalked downward, he watched for carved sigils, listened for the rustle of leathery wings or the click of claws on stone, and sniffed for the scents of brimstone or putrefaction. It seemed likely that if the ancient Nars had left any demon watchdogs behind, their Rashemi successors had cleared them out. But then again, since the witches and their followers had seen fit to seal off the lower vaults, they must not have considered them entirely wholesome.

At the bottom of the stairs, Dai Shan suddenly felt the i

The vault before him had five walls with a doorway in the center of each, and a five-pointed mosaic star in the middle of the floor. Smaller geometric figures and words in an unfamiliar language filled the spaces between the radiating arms.

A later hand, working just as meticulously, had painted another layer of glyphs and symbols over the original pentangle. Thanks in part to his sojourn in Rashemen, Dai Shan was able to interpret some of the newer signs. The spiral horns represented Mielikki; the crescents, Sel ne; the roses and scythes, Chauntea; and the triangles, all three goddesses together.

After a few moments, Dai Shan stepped through the arch that co

The Nars had indeed left demons behind, and the hathrans hadn t cleared them out. Instead, they d taken the same approach here as with the Raumathari spirit traps in the High Country. They d wrapped additional bindings around the originals to make certain the tanar ri would rot in their cages for all time.

Increasingly confident that he was in no danger, but nonetheless proceeding cautiously, Dai Shan prowled onward into a labyrinth of oblique angles and pentagonal forms. At one point, he felt that something else was watching him with the same profound but impotent malevolence as whatever was chained in the star mosaic. At another, he suddenly imagined himself an eight-legged creature crawling down a colossal spider web toward the beautiful winged woman stuck in the strands below. When the fancy passed, he suspected he d just shared the dream of a demon that had gone to sleep in its prison.

But of course, the Nars hadn t left fettered fiends along every inch of the dark and silent maze. Much of the time, Dai Shan found himself exploring spaces that, with their dusty altars, and faded, flaking frescoes depicting the lower worlds, had plainly once served the purposes of spell and ritual but were simply left to inspire a forlorn feeling of abandonment.

Occasionally, despite the gulf of ages and the lack of a common language, he recognized a glyph or image co

Moving and looking for the burial crypts that Falconer claimed were here, Dai Shan just hoped that, despite his ignorance of the customs of the ancient Nars, he d know them when he saw them. He reassured himself that there couldn t be all that many ways to lay a corpse to rest.

And indeed, he recognized the tombs instantly when a turn brought him to another pentacle mosaic painted over with hathran symbols. On the other side was an arch sealed with a wrought-iron gate, and beyond that, stone sarcophagi, and jars and urns in niches in the walls.

Very well, Dai Shan thought. I found it. I can carry out Falconer s instructions forthwith. The question is, do I want to?

On one level, the answer was, surely not. No rational man would be eager to do the bidding of an undead creature when he didn t even understand what would ensue as a result.

But it was also true that in a game of Stones, a player sometimes found himself obliged to take his turn without sensing how the opponent would respond or what overall strategy he was pursuing. One placed one s stone anyway, because the only alternative was to forfeit.

Till that point, Dai Shan had promised aid to several of the other players in the game that was Rashemen without doing too much except for facilitating the murder of the Aglarondans to assist anybody. But clearly, with Falconer making demands of him, and the berserkers of the Griffon Lodge marching on the Fortress of the Half-Demon, the overall situation was evolving, and mere pledges wouldn t serve much longer. If Dai Shan didn t make himself genuinely useful to someone, he was going to lose everybody s trust. So he would. He just had to proceed in a ma

The Shou walked around the edge of the design on the floor. He trusted the ancient hathrans arts, but still, why walk across the center of the demon cage and so make all but certain that the thing within knew someone was outside? He climbed the wrought-iron gate like it was a ladder, and then, not needing to cling with his hands to keep his balance, removed a mallet and chisel from inside his coat. Reciting the words that Falconer had taught him by rote, disclosing nothing of their meaning he hammered the first of three vertical notches.

It seemed a wooded slope like any other, until a dark, droning cloud rose from the leafless trees at the top. Some of Vandar s lodge brothers exclaimed in alarm.