“Eat,” Vanyel advised, guessing that she hadn't paused for food or drink since this morning. “Jervis, did you and Tashir find anything?”

The armsmaster chewed and swallowed before answering. “Maybe. If you're done below, I'd like your word on it. It's a room, first floor, smack square in the center of this building. Not much bigger nor a closet, an' has just one thing in it; a floor-t'-ceiling pillar; same stone as the outside. Might just be a kinda kingpost for the palace, it's bigger around than I can reach, but I never seen anything like it. You said look for odd, well, that's odd.”

“Tashir?”

The young man froze in mid-bite, and stared at him like a cornered rabbit.

Vanyel felt an uncomfortable sympathy for him. His own Empathy told him Tashir was dancing on a hair-thin thread of nerve at the moment. There was no doubt in Vanyel's mind that he was trying to jar his memories loose. There was also no doubt in his mind that the youngster was, literally, going through hell. But there was no help for it; if the mystery was to be solved and Tashir cleared of guilt, it was likely to take all four of them to do it.

“Tashir, what do you know about this room Jervis found?'' he prompted.

Tashir swallowed and licked his lips. “Nothing,” he replied faintly. “They wouldn't ever let me in there. Everybody else got taken in at least once, but not Mother, and not me.”

“Tashir, that's something,'“ Vanyel chided gently. “You said 'everybody'; do you mean that literally? Servants, too?”

The young man nodded so hard he started to tip his plate off his knee. Jervis caught it before it spilled. Tashir hardly noticed, he was so intent on Vanyel. “Servants, too, Vanyel. Everybody.”

“That's more than odd; that's smacking of a mystery.” He brooded for a moment, staring at the crackling flames in the hearth. He was greatly tempted to seek the place out now, this instant.

But then he thought of the empty rooms filled with wreckage and the long, haunted halls he'd have to traverse to get there. He hesitated, and shivered. Strong stomach, battle-trained or not, there was a limit.

I don't think so. I'm not up to it. Besides, I'd rather not chance a light being seen from outside. It'll be there in the morning.

“D-d-d-do you want to go there tonight?” Tashir stuttered, patently not relishing the thought at all.

“No, Tashir, not tonight,” he replied, half-smiling as a rush of relief brought a little more color to the youngster's cheeks. “Not tonight,” he repeated, echoing his own thought. “We've all had enough for one day. It's been there all this time; it'll be there in the morning.”

Jervis broke the silence that followed. “Van, I was noticin' something. Rooms where there wasn't any folks, hardly anything's smashed. Maybe a curtain torn, chair broken, that kind of thing. Rooms where there was people, they're wrecked. The more people, the worse.”

“It's the same down below,” Vanyel told him, as Jervis continued demolishing his dinner thoughtfully. “Savil, does that kind of pattern suggest anything to you?”

She scowled with concentration. “Yes, but I can't think what. Damn!”

Vanyel followed a stray thought. “Tashir, when they broke in and found the mess, where were you?”

“Th-the Great Hall,” he faltered. “I just sort of woke up and I was there.”

“And the worst wreckage was in the Great Hall?” Vanyel turned to Jervis for confirmation.

“Near as I can tell from what I've seen so far.”

As he tried to trigger his own memory, he had a momentary flash of that dream he'd had, of being surrounded by a whirlwind of devilish creatures. He realized with a start that made him sit up straight that that dream actually had an echo in his recent experience. The fire flared on the hearth, and with it, memory.

He'd been playing bait, at the beginning of the Karsite ampaign, sitting all alone in an old keep just behind the Border.

The keep was supposed to be held by nothing more formidable than an old man and a handful of retainers. Certainly the Guard was days away at the best forced march pace, though that shouldn't have mattered. Because no one was supposed to know that the keep was held so weakly. And no one was supposed to know that it guarded a very strategic supply route.

But someone did know; someone had been leaking information to the Karsites. Poorly-guarded keeps of strategic importance behind the Valdemar lines were being decimated, the occupants slaughtered, leaving holes the strategists didn't learn about until it was too late. Or worse w en the strategists checked on their supposed holdings, they found keeps somehow occupied by hostile forces.

Vanyel read the signs of magic, and had known only magic could counter these attacks. So Vanyel had ridden Yfandes to exhaustion to reach this one, a likely target. He'd cleared out the old man and his following, and waited.

And the attack had come, in the form of a gretshke-Swarm; demi-demonic creatures (mostly head, teeth, and appetite) that, taken individually, were inconsequential. An ordinary fighter could deal with one - or  two; and they certainly were not immune to cold iron. But a Swarm - that was another matter. The Swarm contained hundreds, if not thousands, of the creatures. You could kill them by the dozens, and still they would overwhelm you, like encountering an avalanche of starving rats.

A mage didn't control a Swarm; he just unleashed it. When the food was gone, or when they were sated, they would return to their own plane if they were given an exit. So a mage using them would customarily lure a Swarm to the Portal to their plane that he had opened within his target area and cast a shield about the target to keep the Swarm from escaping. He would wait an appropriate length of time - usually no more than a candlemark; the Swarm was fast - and open the Portal again to pull whatever of the Swarm remained back to their own plane. He would take the shield down then, and an occupying force could move in.

All this required someone on the level of Adept; which made it likely that the mage in question was one of the three Adepts the Karsites had hired when they began this. One of the three had threatened, then launched the brutal incineration of an entire town; the town had been saved, but in stopping him Mardic and Donni had called the flames on themselves in a desperate attempt to confine them.

It had worked. It had been a brave, unselfish-and ultimately fatal - ploy. The best that could be said was that their pain had been mercifully short.

Vanyel had been determined that before he was pulled off the lines, he would have that particular mage's life. By preference, given the other things they'd done, he would have all three, but he wanted that one.

The only problem was, the mages themselves refused confrontation; striking time and time again where he wasn't. By the time of this ambush he'd had enough. He had begun hunting them with the patience and stealth that would eventually earn him the name “Shadowstalker” when he tracked down the second Adept.

But that was in the future; at that moment, the first step on his self-appointed road of revenge, he had been waiting in the darkened keep, fueling the delicate illusion that made it appear to that unknown enemy that only the old man and his dozen retainers and fighters were within those walls, and all were asleep. He felt the shields go up; he felt the portal open. The Swarm descended on the Hall of the keep, where he waited for them beside the firepit in the center. And he threw up his own shield, abandoning the illusion, and watched as the Swarm ravened outside it, tearing the scant furnishings of the Hall to shreds in frustration, unable to reach the meat so tantalizingly out of reach.

While he smiled grimly and set up a second shield between the Swarm and the portal. When the mage opened the Portal again, then established a probe to check on the results of his work, Vanyel would seize on the probe before he could withdraw it, and use it to send him an unexpected surprise.