Abruptly Kalrakin stopped and turned, and Coryn suppressed an urge to back up and close the door. Instead, she stood there and faced him as he stomped toward her. Her eyes were drawn to his hands. Once again she saw that pearly stone as he flipped it hack and forth. She was awed, and frightened, as the angry sorcerer approached; the ominous stone seemed to he wavering and dancing in the air. Her breath caught with a sudden jab of fear.

But Kalrakin walked right past her, without so much as acknowledging her existence. With amazement she grasped that he couldn't see her, and she felt a thrill of stealthy accomplishment as she fell in behind him, following the tall sorcerer along the hallway.

"You were a fool to let that little bitch live!" he snarled. Only then did she notice Luthar, standing outside the very door she had penetrated at the beginning of the Test. She had descended far from that place, and wandered a long distance through caverns and that vast chamber, yet she was not surprised to find herself right back at her very point of origin.

"I am sorry for the suggestion, Master," murmured the rotund man, his face paling. Coryn saw a bruise on Luthar's cheek, and a nasty sear of a burn that had blazed along his hand and wrist. Kalrakin had already punished his companion. "But it seemed our best chance of opening the wizard lock."

"Bah!" the dour mage turned again, startling Coryn who was just a few steps behind him. But once again he showed no sign that he was aware of her presence. His face distorted by fury, eyes blazing, he stretched out his fist, fingers clenched around the stone. White light pulsed and the sorcerer grimaced with the strain of casting his most powerful magic. Paving stones rose from the floor, shattered against each other, shards flew through the air; a whole section of the hallway was destroyed by Kalrakin's wrath.

But his wild magic was an abomination here, Coryn told herself. She could feel the suffering of the Tower, pain buzzing in the air all around her; every fiber of her flesh wanted to strike out, to stop the man's rampage.

But as the pieces of stone flew past her, and some, to her astonishment, right through her, she understood she was not really in that corridor. Some arcane means allowed her to see what was happening, to observe, hear, and even smell in that place, but she could neither come to harm nor lash out at Kalrakin. She found herself admiring the Tower's ingenuity-and its inherent courage, standing up to Kalrakin's destructive tantrum and still resisting the efforts of the wild mage to gain access to key locations.

Another white door gleamed, right in the middle of the hallway-though Coryn was certain it hadn't been there a moment earlier. She went over to it, opened it, and passed into a large cavern. The dank air stung her nostrils with a powerful acidic stench. It was dark, but even though she no longer carried her torch-she wasn't sure just where she had left it, but it was no longer in her hand-somehow she could see clearly.

Her steps carried her across an uneven floor, around great spikes of stone that jutted upward; curiously, she noticed many more of these strange formations on the cavern ceiling, dangling downward. Coming around a large shaft, where upward and downward spires had apparently merged into a column, she couldn't suppress a gasp of astonishment, and fright.

She had heard of dragons, but the creature coiled in front of her was much more of a nightmare than anything she could imagine. The mere sight of it made her knees weak, and brought a clammy sweat to her palms as she clenched and unclenched her fingers. The serpent was green, massively snakelike, and was watching her through hooded slits of eyes. Every instinct, every nerve of her being urged her to turn around and flee.

Instead she stood there and met that monster's lazy, disinterested gaze with a steely glare of her own.

"I have slain your comrades. You will find their corpses over there," indicated the serpent in an oily hiss of a voice. A forked tongue slithered from between the toothy jaws, jutting pointedly to the left.

"I do thank you," Coryn said. She was about to start along the indicated path when some notion caused her to hesitate. She faced the beast and curtsied. "Thank you, Sir Dragon," she added.

The wyrm snorted, but she thought that it was at least a little pleased by the gesture. As she walked past the dragon, toward a narrower continuation of the underground cavern, the beast spoke, almost a whisper in her ear.

"If you had tried to flee, I would have killed you."

"I know," she replied, speaking the truth. Somehow the words came out calmly, despite the terrified pounding of her heart.

Very frightened, now, Coryn hurried down the winding cavern, and quickly found Jenna and Dalamar. The woman lay twisted on her back, while Dalamar slumped back against the cave wall beside her. Though she walked right up to them, they, like Kalrakin, showed no awareness of her presence. But neither did they seem to be dead, as the dragon had claimed.

She saw immediately that the red-robed wizard was badly injured but breathing. Jenna's face was streaked with sweat, her jaw clenched in pain. Her leg lay bent outward at a grotesque angle, and a massive bloodstain, looking like black ink, spread out on her crimson robe. Tears rolled from beneath her closed eyelids.

Dalamar, too, had been hurt badly. He lay limply for a time, then rolled up and turned away from Jenna, coughing hard, slumping forward to lean on both hands, hacking until it seemed as though his lungs would burst. Finally, he shook his head, wearily wiped the sweat from his brow, and turned back to the sorceress. Jenna's face was deathly pale, her expression growing slack. The elf dribbled a few drops of water onto her lips, then lay back with a groan and covered his eyes with his arm.

Was this a real scene? Coryn felt a horrifying twinge of guilt-was it somehow her fault that the two wizards had been so grievously hurt? She had a sickening sense that the answer to both questions was "yes."

"I'm sorry," she whispered. And she knew that she had to move on.

Between the two wizards, Coryn saw another white door beckoning her. She couldn't help casting a lingering look at the black-robed figure. He looked weak there, and she wished that she could offer him comfort.

Instead, she touched the latch on the door, lifted it, and walked through.

The sun was shining brightly; it was hotter than she had ever known it to be, as she continued across the unending sandy waste. This arid flatland had been draining her strength for hours. No tree, no hillock, no ridge, not a single formation rose above the featureless plain. She wondered if this part of the Test was simply a challenge to her physical endurance. Coryn stopped and thought about her problem for a moment, but she could picture no spell to magically conjure up food or drink. Much less a map, she thought with a chuckle.

So she stumbled along, wearily, for more hours. Her feet were blistered, and eventually she became so exhausted that she almost slept as she walked. But she wouldn't allow herself to rest for more than a few minutes at a time-as soon as her eyelids grew heavy, and her head began to nod, she pushed herself to her feet and resumed her relentless trek. Her belly growled. And her hunger was nothing compared to the parching thirst that left her tongue feeling like a piece of dried leather in the arid cavern of her mouth. Water-what a precious substance, yet so easy to take for granted!

Certainly, the wild magic of her former life might have led her to a spring, or at least indicated where she might dig to discover moisture, but she never even considered employing those former powers; in her mind, she had already cast them away, forever. She would die of hunger and thirst before she would go back to that vulgar pathway, even if it held the means to her survival.