"I am getting old," Sir Robert said to himself and resumed the descent.

The tunnel curved once again, and Robert lost the Knights ahead of him behind another wall of rock. Moving forward resolutely, with that alert, discouraging feeling that one gets when walking alone at night in an unfamiliar house, Robert turned the corner cautiously.

The corridor, empty of his companions, ended not five feet in front of him in a red door, a silver fleur-di-lis planted firmly in its center.

Brandon had seen no door. Indeed, he had passed farther down the corridor, he and Bayard. He heard Sir Robert stop behind him but thought little of it because the old men had stopped repeatedly since they had entered the darkness. Instead, Sir Brandon Rus thought of the sea.

How the tunnel was like the whirls in a seashell. For a moment, Brandon stopped. He listened for the sound of breakers in the corridor below him.

Once he had seen the sea as a boy; his mother set her bright blue tents by the waters. It was a story that Brandon did not tell.

The Solamnics and landholders from here to the Virkhus Hills had heard the stories about his gift for archery. It was said that he missed but once, and in missing, hit the target at which he should have been aiming all along. But they had not heard this story.

The sea was devouring, terribly strange. The Blood Sea of Istar, they called it, though his tutors had told him that its waters are red only at midocean. Still, there was an unfamiliar cast to the waves-a blue that bordered on a deep violet, a disturbing warmth to the tide.

Nonetheless, his sister Almia chose to swim. Far on the horizon, he could see her, her light hair rising and falling on the violet waves.

Brandon shook his head. Was there something in this tunnel-some gas, some closeness in the air-that was stealing his wakefulness? Bayard coughed again at his shoulder. Why these thoughts of the sea?

Yet…

Yet there, as the sun dropped low on the water, its light settled on his sister's hair, spangling it gold and silver and red and violet. She was out a perilous distance, near the Road of the Dolphins, where the ships catch the strong northern current and sweep up the eastern coast like iceboats.

Brandon sat on the shore, lulled by sun and the regular sounds of the tide, the ugly and wonderful smell of kelp. Nearby, he watched a pelican hunt, watched the huge bird sail awkwardly over the purple crest of the waves and then, its quarry spotted, wheel over to stall and plunge headfirst into the water, suddenly, limply, as though the bird had been dropped by Brandon's crossbow.

He looked up then and saw his sister gliding across the face of the water. At first it seemed she was caught in the Road of the Dolphins, drawn northward by the powerful surge of the current, her long hair golden in the wake of her passage.

Already there was an outcry on the beach. Mother's retainers were stripping off their armor. One, a large man named Venator, was already knee-deep in the water, striding out to sea as though something would lift him onto the surface and he could stride out over the waves to rescue Almia.

Brandon fumbled with his bow. For some reason, whether youth or fear or the whim of the gods, the arrow was too large for the bow, then too small for his clumsy fingers.

It was then that Almia went under. Where she had been, the huge red back of the creature twisted angrily above the water for a moment. Finally Brandon fired the weapon, watching in horror as the arrow skipped harmlessly over the purple waters.

And into the breast of his sister.

Then the thing dove, its man-sized flukes turning once, high in the air above the Road of the Dolphins, and the sea was smooth once more.

He had run away then, in rage and sorrow and hatred for himself, marveling at his stupidity and its result. When they found him later, they had tried to console him-the viziers, his mother, the old Knight, Venator.

It had been too late, they said. There was nothing he could have done to save the girl. The creature had destroyed his sister and then taken her form in the water.

He had done what any archer, any brother would do, they claimed. The creature would not kill again. To this day Brandon Rus did not believe them.

By now the pain in Bayard's leg was consuming his thoughts and his strength. Weaving on Sir Brandon's shoulder, he stood hollow-eyed at the front of the party, his stare fixed on nothing in particular as Brandon guided him through the toothed and silent landscape of the cavern.

Something drove Bayard Brightblade that he could not put words around. It was a journey by night, he thought, with the road marked uncertainly, the signposts old and weathered and wordless.

It was like the streets of Old Palanthas, where as a boy he wandered, orphaned and cast away.

The buildings became stone in Palanthas at the point where the great South Road narrowed northward into the city's heart. Oh, there were some brick, some wattle, and some simple wooden lean-tos back in the most forsaken alleys. But mostly it was stone there, and fourteen-year-old Bayard Brightblade, fresh from an overthrown castle and the sight of slaughtered parents and retainers, found a moment of peace in its craggy stillness.

Though to a lad from the countryside, the city streets were as strange as the face of a moon. As strange as the black moon nobody has ever seen, that legends and odes and metaphysics claim must be there for things to make sense.

So he had followed the road north, and the buildings crept closer to the curbside. North and ever north he had traveled, the smells of garbage and spice and sweat all fading into the distant breath of salt water as, ahead of him, the moonlight raced across the marble of public buildings and the flickering Bay of Branchala.

There had been a tower off to the west-whether he passed it or was passing or only approaching when it came into notice he did not remember now. Only that it was a tower, suddenly on fire, white flames coursing up its sides as if it had been doused with oil and ignited. Fresh from the devastation of grounds and manor, the boy stopped, marveled, awaited alarms, the smell of smoke.

The tower burned yet was not consumed. It burned briefly, then faded until he could barely see it, a black silhouette against a gray darkness.

Corposant, they had called it. Branchala's fire. But he did not know these things when he saw the light, the strange and wonderful incandescence in the western sky.

He thought instead that the sun had set in the tower.

He had taken this as a sign. Though he still did not know what was expected of him, he thought that something had been given to him. That Palanthas was the place where the tower burned made it extraordinary, different from the faceless plains and foothills and mountains he had passed through to get there. It was at least something. And though in the months to come he would question that "something," whether it meant anything at all, it must have had meaning in some mysterious way. For living in Palanthas, under carts and bridges and occasional lean-tos by night, by day in the network of tunnels that made up the Great Library of Palanthas, soon he discovered the book that revealed to him the curse of Castle di Caela and the part he would play in lifting it. All this from a pure accident of weather.