It was then that the shapes appeared. They took form out of the heart of the opals and the smoke from the extinguished candle. At first it seemed like a trick of reflected light-that a vapor had fallen from the night air, out of the confusion of wind and weather, and rested in the centermost opal. But the darkness hung all about the brooch, a greater dark inside of the dark, turning and boiling and adopting a solid shape.

Then the stones seemed to open in front of me, and Plainsmen appeared in the jeweled blackness. They moved silently, smoothly, with a motion born in the grasslands, where they ran with the deer and the leopard. Still too surprised to be frightened, I squinted to see them more clearly in the tricky light.

There were six figures, gaunt and dusty and tall, wrapped in furs and wearing old ornaments of beads and claws and leather thongs. Beneath the folds of mist-or was it fur?- draped over them, I could see their skin, weathered and tough, as though a century of winds and rain had descended upon them.

Their leader was the oldest, the tallest. On his head he wore the skull of an antelope, his graying forelocks streaming through its vacant eyes, its tall, thin rack of antlers lending him height and a fearsome otherworldliness, as though he were no Plainsman at all, but a thing out of nature or beyond it.

He scanned the landscape in front of him slowly, intently, as though he had forgotten something, had left something behind here. Then his gaze pierced the surface of the stone and rested upon me, and for a moment, his eyes flickered like a distant display of fireworks, green and beyond sound and at the faintest edge of sight.

I swallowed hard and gripped the arms of my chair. If I was expected to say something, I was confounded if I knew what it was. I started to hail the spectral figures in front of me, to offer them greetings or salute but most of all to find out who they were and what they wanted. I opened my mouth, but the leader cut me short, raising a lean hand and staring at me without malice or venom, or even all that much attention. He seemed to be looking somewhere beyond me, though he looked straight at me at the same time.

Slowly and dramatically, he beckoned. He motioned me. to follow him into the center of the stone.

"Not on your life," I muttered, my right hand moving quickly from the chair to the sword on the table in front of me. Suddenly, in the black center of the topmost stone, the Great Hall of di Caela appeared. I blinked and looked again.

As if focusing my gaze, the scene in the opal shifted from wall to wall, resting finally on the high, curtained balcony from which in a nightmare time several years behind me, I had watched the Scorpion announce his evil presence in a hall dark with solemnity and night.

There, amidst the story of Huma carved in the marble frieze that covered the balcony ledge, my brother Brithelm's shape had joined the Knights and the dragons and the obscure tendrils of marble greenery.

As I watched, the stone shape turned and looked at me.

Brithelm's eyes were empty and obscure, his hair and skin dull, as though I watched him through a veil of webbing and mist. Slowly, emerging from the frieze like a cobra rising to strike, a pale hand, a knife in its grip, took shape from the stone and the smoke. Turning toward my brother, it set blade to his throat.

The white of the marble split in a dark red line. And surely enough, all light and sound seemed to retreat, and I seemed to see my brother at the end of a gray and swirling tunnel.

I cried out. Brithelm's eyes rested on me.

Then, as though he had heard me, he shrank back into the dark of the jewel, passing soundlessly into mist and rock, the sides of the opal converging above him like water converges to cover a sinking stone. The Plainsmen vanished along with him, as though they followed him into the dark. One of them carried a torch that glowed with a green, muted flame that cast its light only on the receding figures themselves, as though they drew in its radiance and absorbed it, leaving the rest of the room in shadows. I stumbled to my feet, reeling, as the Plainsmen drifted into the darkness of the thing in my hand.

From where I stood, they looked like pillars of light as they faded away. That light was the last thing I remembered until Bayard stood above me, shaking and waking me.

First of all, visions were never my strength.

They smack of magic, which for the most part, I do not credit.

For I have seen the illusionists early and late, dressed in the glittering robes embroidered with moons and stars and pentagons and strange planetary designs, sitting on horseback at the edge of the mist-covered drawbridge outside my boyhood home in Coastlund, camped in their eerie, geometrical tents on the plains outside Castle di Caela.

Everywhere that I have seen the magicians, they are trying to get indoors.

Once inside, once they are warm and fed and paid and provided for, I grant you that their tricks can be something to behold. I saw one elderly man set his apprentice on fire.

The boy moved through my father's hall, stepping gracefully around broken crockery, snoring dogs, and capsized tables. All the while his hair and fingers were aflame, and yet no heat touched him.

Once I saw a great glittering stone brought forth from the folds of a dramatic red robe. The bearer of that stone spoke some brief, inaudible words above it, and the crystal clouded. Out of the light and mist at its heart, I saw a room of eggs and bizarre, grotesque creatures hatching from them-half man, but also half lizard or eft or dragon or something. And then, before the vision faded, I saw the stone, or one like it, glowing green and amber, embedded in the chest of a young man.

That was a wondrous night's entertainment, for it was a vision beyond my most fanciful imaginings.

Yet there is always hypnosis. There are mirrors that a clever man can set at just the right angle to reflect the firelight. There are strings and pulleys, secret pockets and panels.

I have always been prone to explain anything by its tricks and its hidden machinery. Indeed, though my own adventures had taught me that there was genuine magic in the world, sometimes at my very doorstep, I was inclined to forget that in my search for reasonable explanations.

So it was as I lay safely on my own bed, puzzling over the cryptic vision of the Plainsman. All the candles were lit in the room, the logs in the fireplace burning as brightly as poor Bayard could manage at a moment's notice. He had discovered and wakened me, and now he was fuming about the room, gathering my belongings, his impatience rising as, caught up in my thoughts, I let him and the page he had brought with him do all the preparations.

"I want things light around me," I said. "I want things visible."

Almost by reflex, the boy lit yet another candle.

"This is no time for dramatics, Galen," Bayard observed quietly. "If for no other reason, you will become a Knight out of simple good manners."

He was downright intimidating in full Solamnic armor. He stood above me like a king from the old stories instead of the man I had seen bedraggled by rain, thrown from his horse in the mountains, or dozing by countless campfires in our long and difficult travels together.

It was as if the armor enlarged him, made him more than what he was, or at least more than he was while he snored or endured bedragglement. Right now he was formidable, banishing the memory of my six spectral visitors almost entirely.

I sat up.

Bayard folded his arms.

"Put on the armor, Galen," he declared flatly. "You realize, don't you, how dishonorable it is to doze on the Night of Reflections?"

"I beg your pardon? 'Doze,' did you say?"