Zedd, Cara, and Rikka seemed frozen where they had begun to climb the stairs.

And then the fleeing bats were gone, driven before some terror coming through the Keep behind them. The soft, fluttering sound they left in their wake echoed its muted alarm through the hall as the bats fled into deeper darkness.

That distant sound was what Rikka had heard but not understood.

Staring at the stairs from where the bats had come, Nicci felt as if she were frozen and immobile in an expectant, silent moment in time, waiting to breathe, waiting for something unimaginable. With a rising sense of panic, she realized that in fact she really couldn't move.

And then a dark shape came sweeping down the stairs like an ill wind. Yet, at the same time, it inexplicably appeared to hang motionless. It seemed composed of swirling black shapes and flowing shadows, creating an inky eddy of obscurity. The dizzying shape of it, the entwining currents of darkness, implied movement that it didn't have.

Nicci blinked, and it was gone.

She urgently renewed her effort to move, but she felt as if she was suspended in warm wax. She could breathe to a small extent, and make headway, but only in the most impossibly slow fashion. Every inch took monumental effort and seemed to take an eternity. The world had become impossibly thick as everything slowed toward a halt.

In the passageway, just behind the others in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, the shape appeared again, suspended in midair above the stone floor. It looked like a woman in a flowing black dress floating underwater.

Even in the midst of growing terror, Nicci found the exotic sight strangely fascinating. The others, with the intruder already past them, were in mid-stride ascending the stairs, as still as if caught in a painting.

The woman's wiry black hair lifted lazily out all around her bloodless face. The loose fabric of the black dress swirled as if in whirls of water. Within the slow turbulence of black cloth and hair, the woman herself seemed nearly unmoving.

It looked like nothing so much as if she were floating under murky water.

Then the figure was gone again.

No, not underwater, Nicci realized.

In the sliph.

That's how Nicci felt, too. It was that kind of strange, otherworldly, suspended sensation of drifting. It was impossibly slow and at the same time blindingly fast.

The figure suddenly appeared again, closer this time.

Nicci tried to call out, but she couldn't. She tried to lift her arms to casi a web, but she drifted too slowly. She thought it might take an entire day just to lift her arm.

Sparkling shards of light glimmered and flashed in the air between Nicci and the others. Magic, she knew, cast by the wizard. It fell far short of the intruder. Even though the brief spate of power sputtered out without having any effect, Nicci was astounded that Zedd had managed to ignite it at all. She had tried much the same thing without any result.

Dark trailers of cloth drifted, fluidly flapping through the hallway. Snaking shapes and shadows curled around as they moved ever so slow The figure wasn't walking, or running. It glided, floated, flowed, almost unmoving within the swirling cloth of the dress.

Then it was gone again.

In a blink, it reappeared, much closer yet. The ghostlike skin stretched tight over a bony face looking as if it had never been touched by sunlight. Snarls of weightless black hair rose up with wisps of the flowing black dress.

It was as disorienting a sight as Nicci had ever seen. She felt as if she were drowning. Panic welled up in her at the feeling of not being able to breathe fast enough, of trying to get the air she needed. Her burning lungs were unable to work any faster than the rest of her.

When Nicci focused her gaze, the figure of the woman was gone. It occurred to her that her eyes, too, were too slow. The hallway was empty again. It seemed that her focus could not keep up with the movement.

Nicci thought that maybe she was having some kind of hallucination brought on by the spells she had cast, by the power of Orden she had tapped into. She wondered if it could be some kind of aftereffect of the spells. Maybe it was Orden itself come to claim her for tampering with such forbidden powers.

That had to be it-something to do with all the dangerous things she had conjured.

The woman appeared again, as if floating up through the murky deep, emerging suddenly into view out of the dark abyss.

This time Nicci could clearly see the woman's austere, angular features.

Blanched blue eyes fixed on Nicci as if there was nothing else in her world. That scrutiny touched Nicci's very soul with icy dread. The woman's eyes were so pale that they seemed as if they had to be sightless, but Nicci knew that this woman could see just fine, not only in the light, but also in the blackest cave, or under a rock where the light of day never touched her.

The woman smiled as wicked a grin as Nicci had ever seen. It was the smile of someone who had no fear but enjoyed causing it, a woman who knew she had everything under her mastery. It was a smile that sent a slow shiver through Nicci.

And then the woman was gone.

In the distance more of Zedd's magic sparked and sputtered briefly before it died out.

Nicci struggled to move, but the world was too thick, the way it sometimes felt in those terrible dreams she had, dreams where she struggled to move but simply couldn't despite how hard she tried. It was the dream where she was trying to run from Jagang. He was always close, coming for her, reaching for her. He was like death itself, intent on the most unimaginable cruelty, as he came toward her. She always wanted desperately to run in those dreams but, despite extraordinary effort, her legs wouldn't move nearly fast enough.

Those dreams always put her in a state of trembling panic. It was a dream that made death so real she could taste its terror.

She'd had that dream one time in camp. Richard had been there. He woke her, asking what was wrong. She gasped back tears as she told him. He cupped her face and told her that it was only a dream and she was all right. She would have given anything to have had him hold her in his arms and tell her that she was safe, but he didn't. Still, his hand on her face, covered with both of hers, and his gentle words, his empathy, had been a comfort that calmed her terror.

This, though, was no dream.

Nicci tried to gasp a breath, to call out to Zedd, but could do neither. She tried to call her Han, her gift, but couldn't seem to connect to it. It was as if her gift was impossibly fast and she was impossibly slow. The two wouldn't mesh.

The woman, her flesh the pallid color of the freshly dead, her hair and dress as black as the underworld, was suddenly right there, right beside Nicci.

The woman's arm floated out, reaching through the swirling black cloth. Parched flesh stretched tightly over her knuckles served to emphasize the skeleton beneath. Her bony fingers brushed along the underside of Nicci's jaw. It was a haughty touch, an arrogant act of triumph.

At the touch, the vibration in Nicci's chest felt as if it might tear her apart.

The woman laughed a hollow, slow, burbling underwater laugh that echoed painfully through the stone halls of the Keep.

Nicci knew without doubt what the woman wanted, what she had come for. Nicci tried desperately to ignite her power, to grab the woman, lunge, to do anything to stop her, but she could do nothing. Her power seemed impossibly distant, crackling so far away that it would take forever to reach it.

As the finger brushed along the length of Nicci's jaw, the woman was gone again, vanishing gently back into the dark depths.

The next time she appeared, she was back at the brass-clad doors leading open to the room with the box. The woman drifted through the doorway, her feet never touching the ground, her dress washing lightly around her.