Wolf rose to his feet with a growl of rage and stalked toward the figure. Abruptly, Aralorn realized what it was that bothered her about the ae’Magi. He cast no shadow from the light of the fire. She noticed something else: Wolf’s path would take him directly across the place that the ae’Magi would have had him sit at.
“Wolf, stop!” she yelled as loud as she could in mouse form, hoping that he’d heed her. “He has no shadow. It’s an illusion.”
Wolf stopped, muting the feral tones in his throat. Her voice broke into his unexpected rage. He did then what he should have done first. Sniffing the air, he smelled only the taint of moat and Uriah, no fire—no human.
Ignoring the pseudo-ae’Magi, Aralorn the mouse scampered to the space toward which Wolf had been baited. “There’s a circle drawn in rosemary and tharmud root here.”
“A containment spell of some sort,” commented Wolf. She was exploring a little more closely than he was comfortable with. She needed to be more careful of herself. “It’s probably best if we don’t trigger it.” His voice was calm, but his body was still stiff. He sketched a sign in the air, and the image of the ae’Magi froze.
“Is he directing the illusion, do you think?” asked Aralorn, bouncing away from the circle toward Wolf.
“I doubt it. He would not have to. The illusion spell can be given directives, and the trap requires no magic to initialize once it is set.” He regained his human form and picked up Aralorn, setting her on his shoulder, where he’d gotten used to having her. “If I had triggered the containment spell, it would probably have alerted him then.”
“Like a spider’s web,” said Aralorn.
“Just so,” agreed Wolf.
He stared at the illusion of his father and made no effort to move away. It wasn’t a spell; she’d have felt it if something was actually affecting Wolf. Maybe it was something more powerful than magic.
“Where to now?” Aralorn asked. “Do we wait for the Uriah to attack, or do we look for the ae’Magi?”
“For someone who should be scared and cowering, you sound awfully eager.” Wolf stood staring at the silhouette of the ae’Magi: His voice wasn’t as emotionless as usual.
“Hey,” replied Aralorn briskly, “it’s better than spending the winter cooped up in the caves.”
Wolf made no answer except to run an absentminded hand over the smooth skin of his cheek as if he were looking for something that wasn’t there.
Aralorn waited as patiently as she could, then said, “He knew that you were coming.”
Wolf nodded. “He’s been expecting me for a long time. I knew that. I should have been more alert for something like this.” He bowed his head. “I should have asked before. What he said, I have to know. Aralorn, when he had you here, did he . . .” His voice tightened with rage and stopped.
“No,” she said instantly. “I’d tell you that before a time like this anyway, so you wouldn’t get upset when you need your wits about you. But look here, the first time I was in his castle, he was working on a spell and wanted to save his energy. I was disappointed, but then a slave must wait on the master’s convenience.”
He was listening. She was taking the right tack, then. “The second time, he was too interested in finding you to worry about it. You shouldn’t let him pull your strings so easily.” She curled her tail against his neck in a quick caress. “I would have lied under these circumstances, you have to know that. But I wouldn’t have hidden something like that when you got me out of there—I don’t think I could have.” And that was as honest as she was comfortable with—but it did the trick.
The tension eased out of him. “You are right, Lady. Shall we go a-hunting sorcerers in the castle? Perhaps you would prefer a Uriah or two to begin with, or one of my father’s other pets. I believe that there are a few that you haven’t seen before. Would Milady prefer to be outnumbered a hundred to two or just by three or four to two? This task can accommodate your tastes.”
“Then of course,” said Aralorn, “once you have attained your goal, we can arrange to have the castle fall on us conveniently. That way we’ll escape mutilation from the outraged populace that you have saved from slavery and worse. Sounds interesting—let’s get to it.” She thought that Wolf might have been smiling as he headed downhill and away from the castle, but it was hard to tell from her vantage point.
The woods grew increasingly dense as Wolf walked farther from the castle. A hoot from an owl just overhead made Aralorn-the-mouse cringe tighter against his neck. “Lots of nasties in these woods,” she said in a mouselike voice devoid of all but a hint of humor.
“And I,” announced Wolf in a grim voice that was designed to let Aralorn know that it was time to be serious, “am the nastiest of all.”
“Are you really?” asked Aralorn in an interested sort of tone. “Oh, I just adore nasties.”
Wolf stopped and looked at the mouse sitting innocently on his shoulder. Most people cowered under that look. Aralorn began, industriously, to clean her whiskers. When Wolf started to walk again, though, she said in a stage whisper, “I really do, you know.”
They emerged from a particularly thick growth of brush into a narrow aisle of grass. In the center of it sat a suggestively shaped altar dedicated to one of the old gods. It was heavily overgrown with moss and lichen until it was almost impossible to tell the original color of the stone. There was nothing unusual about finding the altar, as such remnants dotted the landscape from well before the Wizard Wars. However, the altar itself was flanked by a pair of unusually shaped monoliths.
“Oh dear,” said Aralorn drolly, crawling halfway down his arm to get a good look. “Look. Two of them. I suppose that it must have belonged to one of the fertility gods, hmm?”
The southern monolith was broken about halfway up, but the northernmost stood as tall as a man and almost as big around. When Wolf touched it, it slid sideways with a creak and a groan. He slipped inside the dark hole that was revealed and started down the ladder. Aralorn darted off his arm altogether and checked out the ladder.
“The ladder is a lot newer than the altar,” she commented, flashing back to her post and tucking a paw inside his collar.
“I put it up myself when I saw that there was some kind of exit from the secret tunnels up here. There was no sign of another one, so I suppose it must have rotted completely away. Plague it, Aralorn, you’re going to fall and kill yourself if you don’t stay put!”
She’d darted back out to his arm to get a closer look at the tile work on the wall. He picked her off his wrist and set her firmly back on his shoulder. “Just wait until we get down, and you can have a better look.”
Once on the floor, he closed the opening with a wave and a thread of magic. As soon as it was shut, he let his staff light the hall in which they stood.
Aralorn scrambled to the floor and took her own shape, sneezing a bit from the dust. She scuffed a foot on the floor, revealing a dark, polished surface. The ceiling was as high or higher than the great hall in the castle, and the walls were covered with detailed mosaic patterns of outdoor revelries of times gone by. The ceiling was painted like the night sky, giving the overall impression of being outdoors. Or at least that was what Aralorn assumed. The years had covered the tile on the walls with cracks and knocked down whole sections. The ceiling was badly water-damaged, showing the stonework that held it up through gaps left by fallen plaster.
Reluctant to leave the room without adequate exploration, Aralorn dragged behind Wolf, who’d already ducked through a gap in the wall leading to a drab little tunnel that looked as if a giant mole had dug through the earth. Much less interesting than the room they’d climbed down into, it branched several times. Wolf never hesitated as he chose their way.