"As the saying goes, never confuse a sour disposition with deep thought."

"Just so, lad." The wizard looked relieved by this return to familiar ground. "So when are you off on the queen's business?"

"Tomorrow morning, at first light," Matteo said. "I will ride with Andris to Azuth's temple."

The old wizard gave him a quizzical look. "But Andris has left already."

"What?"

His sharp tone startled Vishna. "It's true," he asserted, as if Matteo had challenged his veracity. "The headmaster's window commands a clear view of the back kitchen gate. I saw Andris slip away while I was in conference with the headmaster. Why is this so strange? He has permission to leave, and the Temple of Azuth is expecting him."

Matteo could not answer. He felt as if his throat was gripped in an iron golem's fist. He could accept that some of Halruaa's wizards kept dark secrets. He could fathom, just barely, that his beloved jordaini order might have had a part in keeping these secrets. That Andris, his dearest friend, could have told him a direct lie-this was beyond comprehension.

He spun on his heel. Vishna seized his arm. "Don't, Matteo," he said quietly. "For the sake of your friend, pause and reflect I can't tell you why Andris went off alone, but this I know: You don't always need to understand your friends' choices, but you should honor them. Go back to Halarahh, and leave him to follow whatever destiny the goddess has given him."

Matteo gently pulled free. "Thank you for the lesson, Master Vishna," he said, speaking the traditional words between jordaini student and teacher. "Your words hold great wisdom, as usual."

Relief flooded the wizard's face. "Then you will return to court?"

"That is not the conclusion I drew from the lesson," the young man said softly. "What I heard you say was that it is not necessary to understand a man's choice but to honor it." With a quick bow, Matteo turned and sprinted for the stables.

He snatched up tack and travel kit at the door. "I'm taking Cyric," he announced to the startled groom. "I'll saddle him myself."

The lad's sigh of relief was almost comic. Cyric, a black stallion of uncommon speed and vile temper, had been named for an evil and insane god. The horse was nearly impossible to ride, but his temperament precisely suited Matteo's mood and purpose.

He set to work saddling and bridling the horse. Cyric must have sensed the jordain's urgency and found it to his liking. For once the stallion stood docile, and even opened his mouth to accept the bit and bridle. Matteo had barely settled into the saddle when Cyric shot out of the stable like a ballista bolt, thundering toward the gate and whatever misadventure waited beyond.

In his watery lair, Akhlaur bent over his table, scrawling with feverish haste as he etched runes into delicate, faintly blue parchment. After much experimentation, he'd found that a triton's hide yielded the finest parchment for his current purposes-long lasting and water resistant, not to mention its pleasing azure hue.

A trio of magic-dazed tritons, for the moment still wearing their blue skins, huddled in one of the cages that lined the vast coral chamber. Akhlaur favored these creatures and considered them nearly the equivalent of elves in terms of usefulness. Except for their coloring, their astonishing beauty, and their seal-like flippers, they resembled humans and were thus excellent test subjects. Their innate magic, however, provided some unexpected and interesting possibilities.

Akhlaur did not limit his studies to tritons. Each cage housed creatures whose lives and deaths contributed to the necromancer's art. Their moans and cries provided a counterpoint to Akhlaur's frenzied thoughts.

"An interesting spell, this," he muttered as he scrawled. "Wouldn't have thought an elf could manage it. Can't be necromancers, elves. Bah! Whoever said that obviously hadn't met my little Kiva."

A note of pride had crept into the wizard's musings concerning the elf woman. He shrugged aside Kiva's years of captivity and torment, choosing to regard her as his "apprentice."

"Apprentices challenge their masters. That is the way of things. You've done well, little elf-" he broke off to concentrate on shaping a particularly clever and lethal rune-"but you're not ready to face Akhlaur in battle."

The wizard finished the spell with a flourish. He rose and stroked his scaled chin as he stalked past a row of cages.

He paused before the bone and coral dungeon that housed the laraken. The monster instinctively lunged toward the life-giving magic surrounding Akhlaur, then cringed away when it realized the source.

Akhlaur considered his pet for a long moment. He needed a subject upon which to test the difficult spell he'd just transcribed. The laraken had survived this spell once, but Akhlaur could not be entirely certain that it would do so again. Most of the wizardly enchantments drained from Kiva passed through the laraken whole and with full detail; this one came to Akhlaur as the mere shadow of a spell. The laraken had absorbed the general shape and form during the casting, and passed this imperfect report along to its necromancer master. Akhlaur had filled in some gaps. Most likely he had improved the spell, but with elven magic, who knew?

"Too risky," he decided. "Let us send another beast first, and see how it fares."

The necromancer strolled past his collection of monsters. One, a fierce, four-armed fishman that reminded him of a mutant sahuagin, caught his eye. These creatures were common enough in the Elemental Plane. Should the experiment fail, it would be a simple matter to acquire another.

With a nod, Akhlaur shook out the parchment roll and began to read aloud. The spell he'd taken from the laraken-which in turn the laraken had taken from Kiva-rang through the living water. Bubbles rifted from the necromancer's lips and drifted off to encircle the caged beast. They spun and dipped and glowed, bringing to mind elves dancing beneath a starlit sky. Akhlaur ignored the elven flavor of Kiva's spell and concentrated on the sheer ingenuity of it.

As the chant continued, the bubbles began to merge, growing in size as they united. When Akhlaur pronounced the final, keening word of power, the bubbles converged into a single sphere that surrounded the monster.

For a moment the necromancer merely stood and watched as the creature threw itself from one side of its prison to the other, gasping in the thin and unfamiliar air. The scent of its terror was as intoxicating as a greenwitch's herb garden. Akhlaur drew in long draughts, taking time to savor its pungency. When at last he felt pleasantly sated, he took a small coral circlet from a spell bag and placed it between him and the entrapped monster. It hung like a round, empty frame on an invisible wall, or perhaps a peephole such as the powerless and suspicious often carved into their doors.

Again Akhlaur began to chant. A wall of power began to leech from the edges of the coral circle, gleaming with weird greenish light. When the wall spanned the vast chamber, the wizard took a tiny metal token and hurled it at the coral frame, shouting a single word.

The token disappeared with a burst of light and sound. The bubble lurched toward the coral circlet. It clung, and the air it contained rushed through the hole in a whirling spill of bubbles. The monster, too, was sucked toward the opening. Its form elongated weirdly and flowed through the opening like a genie emerging from a narrow-necked bottle.

In moments the giant bubble was gone, and the monster stood but three paces from Akhlaur. The wizard dispelled the wall of force with a single gesture and smiled into his captive's hideous face. The monster bared its fangs and snarled like a cornered wolf.