"I don't see anything," Faalken said back.

Tarrin grabbed a candle off the wall in an innocuous move, then suddenly hurled it ahead with terrific force. The candle passed directly through those shadows, and they seemed to swirl around the speeding candle as it passed through, like smoke, rippling and reverberating in a blatantly visible pattern.

"Shadows don't do that," Faalken said flatly, drawing his sword.

But the swirling shadow simply vanished without a sound, and the death-stench evaporated like mist. Tarrin looked around in confusion, hardly believing what his nose was telling him. "It's gone," he said in surprise.

"Can you still smell it?"

"No, when it disappeared, the smell just disappeared too," he told him.

"Let's go tell Dolanna about this," he said, ramming his sword home in its scabbard.

Tarrin's nervousness about going into public was banished by this new feeling of anxious fear. If it could appear as quickly as it disappeared, it could be on them before either could blink if it appeared close enough. Tarrin kept every sense open and scanning, looking for any trace, smelling for the faintest whiff, anything, that would give them a split-second's warning. He was so wrapped up in it that he stopped in surprise when they entered the main hall.

The hall was a grand affair, over one hundred paces long and about seventy-five paces wide. The floor was filled with table, and those tables were occupied. The smell of it almost bowled him over as a tidal wave of scents stacked one on another assaulted his nose. The murmuring roar of the more than hundred people in the hall confused his ears, and the torches and candles burning in the room gave off myriad shadows that tried to draw away his eyes. Numerous dogs prowled around the tables and among the rushes, sometimes fighting among themselves for the largest scraps thrown from the tables. The general din quieted significantly as the people became aware of him, staring at him and whispering among themselves.

Much to his surprise, he stood up tall and straight and stared back at them until they all looked away.

He had no idea where that came from. Perhaps that too was the instincts, the Cat, at work.

He pondered at it while Faalken led him across the room, the eyes of the hall following him as discreetly as they could manage. He was vaguely aware of the song in his mind, the murmuring sounds that represented the Cat, aware that it was growing stronger inside him. He hadn't realized that it could be so strong so fast; Dolanna had said that she had contained it, dulled its power so that Tarrin would have a chance to get used to it gradually. If it was this strong now, he shuddered to think of how strong it would be when it was contained no longer. But there was no failure in this struggle. Dolanna had already warned him that if he failed to control the Cat, it would drive him mad. And some part of himself knew it too.

They reached the Duke's table, on the raised dais at the end of the hall where his ruling seat usually stood. There were seven people seated at the table. Arren, Dolanna, Walten, Tiella, and three other people that Tarrin didn't know. Two of them were middle aged men much the same age as Arren, one wiry and thin and the other with the same wide-shouldered stockiness that said he was used to wearing armor. The other person was a woman. She was rather young, with sharp, strong features, more handsome than she was pretty. Her hair was a chestnut brown, and she was wearing a rather elegant gown. Arren stood and welcomed them in a loud, calm voice, then offered them seats at his table. Tarrin watched Tiella and Walten carefully for a moment, watching them gape at the change in him. But, to their credit, neither of them flinched or looked away. Tiella even smiled slightly.

Tarrin leaned in close to Dolanna as he passed her seat. "We have to talk. Now," he told her in a hushed voice.

She gave him a calm, curious look, then looked at Faalken, who nodded quickly and slightly. Dolanna stood and gave Arren a warm smile. "I have need to speak with the young one a moment, my Duke," she told him. "If you will excuse us?"

"Certainly," he said with curiosity tinging his voice.

Tarrin led Dolanna over to the corner of the grand hall, then turned to face her with his back to the wall. Faalken joined them quickly. "Dolanna, I saw something up in the hallway. It was something like a living shadow. If it didn't smell the way it did, I may not have seen it."

"Smelled? How did it smell?"

"Evil," he told her. "Death, decay, hatred, but it was evil," he said with a shudder.

"A shadow, you say?"

"Aye," Faalken told her. "Tarrin threw a candle at it, and its body looked like it was made of liquid shadow."

"A Wraith!" she gasped. "What would a Wraith be doing here?"

"What is a Wraith?" Tarrin asked.

"It is a creature summoned from the Lower World," she told him. "It is the spirit of a man who had done great evil in his life. They are not free, they must obey the orders and commands of the Wizard who summoned them. It was not here by chance."

"Then why was it here?" Faalken wondered.

"That I cannot tell you, but the fact that it was here does not bode well. It may have been sent to kill someone, or merely to spy. Their shadow-like bodies make them excellent spies. Arren must know of this immediately. That creature may be eyes for a hostile force."

"Dolanna, if it was eyes for a hostile force, it wouldn't have been sitting at the end of a closed hallway," Faalken told her. "If it was there to spy, it was looking for a specific person that walked along that hallway."

They both looked at Tarrin.

"Possibly," she answered the unspoken question. "If the Were-cat was sent to kill him, it may have been checking to see if she was successful."

"And now it knows that she failed."

"Why would that matter?" Tarrin asked. "I'm a nobody. Why would they be watching me?"

"I do not know," she said. "And that is not a good thing. Somebody outside is acting on information I do not have. If that is it at all. It may have had an entirely different mission in mind." She pursed her lips. "But it is best to assume the worst, so that is what we will do. We cannot leave now. Night is the time of the Wraith. They cannot exist in open sunlight, so we will leave in the morning, when their eyes cannot follow and the summoner must rely on another means of scrying us. In the meantime, everyone will move into an apartment with only one entrance and as few windows as possible."

"But what about the dinner?" Faalken asked.

"As of right now, it is of no moment." She stepped slightly away from Tarrin. All three of them looked towards the raised table, and it was only seconds before Arren looked in their direction. Dolanna made a discreet gesture for him to join them, and he immediately stood up.

"Something's wrong," he said soberly as he joined them.

"Tarrin and Faalken found a Wraith in the passageway outside his door," she told him bluntly.

"A Wraith, eh?" Arren said grimly. "That's not a good sign."

"We do not know why it was here, but we are going to assume that it is part of what happened to Tarrin. We will leave at dawn tomorrow."

"Good," he interrupted. "If there's a Wraith after you, you sure as light don't go outside in the dark."

"Yes," she agreed. "Until then, I am putting our group out of eyesight. I need from you an apartment, with two or three goodly sized rooms, with only one door opening out to the keep. And with as few windows as you can manage."

"I have something like that," he said. "It's a guest apartment, with a bedroom, a room for a maid, and a sitting room. It only has two windows, one in each bedroom, and a single door to the hallway."

"That will do," she told him. "Tarrin, go to Walten and Tiella and have them come here."