Some movement did appear in the corner of Phin’s eye and he turned to it almost desperately, but then drew in his breath. At the base of the circular dais of ascending stairs, the dark floor seemed to shimmer as it turned a milky white. A figure began to rise upward through the stone. It was robed all in white and seemed to be wearing some sort of crown, but a nimbus of light that made Phin shield his eyes made it impossible to perceive detail. It did seem to be facing toward him.
Phin did not know if running or playing frozen was a better idea, but in truth he did not know if he was up to a run. The cold feeling he associated with necromancy gripped his innards and he shivered to his core.
The figure stopped rising at the height of a man and the light flared more strongly, causing Phin to close his eyes. When he opened them, the man was staring back at him. He was an older fellow with a salt-and-pepper beard, deep frown lines across his forehead, and a long nose with a distinctive hook. Phin knew the face. The man’s crown was more of a circlet with a zigzag pattern on top, and his long, rumpled robes were an all-too-familiar shade of gray. In one hand he held an onyx wand twisting like the root of a tree, with a great golden gem the size of a goose egg atop it.
“ Briandh, bodoan,” the man said, speaking the old language of Tull. Phin answered by rote in the same tongue.
“Greetings to you, brother.”
The man walked up the stairs towards Phin with the stride of an old campaigner, belying stooped shoulders and the network of lines at the corners of pale green eyes. He shook back a wide sleeve from his empty hand and stretched it out toward Phin, who brought his own hand up automatically. They shook, but as their hands touched Phin gasped and swayed on his feet for he felt like his brain had been kicked over on its side and everything was spilling out. He saw Llache-on-Loch-Hwloor, and tall Abverwar for the first time. Voices of his instructors. A young girl, pretty and blonde, laughing in the gray robes. And books. Lots of books. Lessons read, examinations taken. More reading, memorization that faded in days, other things that Phin never forgot. Souterm, Nesha-tari. Zeb and the Westerners, and the Duchess Claudja. Black boots with sharp, cruel heels. Then Deskata, frozen in mid motion.
Phin stumbled and nearly went backward down the stairs, but the man braced him with a hand on his shoulder.
“Your forgiveness, Phinneas Phoarty,” he said. “That is a lot faster than asking questions.”
“You, you, you…”
“Yes, you know me,” the man nodded, then turned his face and his hooked nose to profile. “Not too bad a likeness, I reckon.”
The man was referring to a portrait he had seen in Phin’s head, which Phin had seen every day for the ten years he was at Abverwar. It was one of several hanging above the Chancellor’s table in the mess hall. Second from the left, in fact.
“Kanderamath,” Phin said, and the man frowned.
“Well…almost. More like Kanderamath’s ghost, to be blunt about it.”
Phin only stared, for the second Witch King of Tull had been dead for around five centuries, ever since he had caused the First Opening of Vod‘Adia. Despite being dead, Kanderamath narrowed his eyes and stared off into space for several moments, his gray-flecked eyebrows rising as he did so. He looked at Phin.
“So you did not come here for me at all.” The old Witch King turned and looked at the book on the floor. “You only brought an item of mine here by chance.”
“Kanderamath,” Phin said again, for he had little idea of what else to say. Kanderamath looked at him sideways, and sighed.
“Do not take this the wrong way, Phinneas, but I had rather hoped for a wizard of a somewhat…greater competence. The Circle has done a number on your brain, boy. If they ever catch you, tell them I am sorely disappointed by what they have become.”
Phin stared at the crowned figure, then looked all around the chamber filled with light of a strange quality, as though everything were stuck in a frozen moment.
“Did, did you stop time?”
Kanderamath smiled faintly. “In effect, but not in reality. Time stops for no one. It is however possible to step out of the stream, for a few minutes. And a few minutes is all that we have. Hearken unto me, Phinneas.”
The Witch King took a firmer grip on Phin’s shoulder and looked him deep in the eyes.
“My entrance into Vod’Adia was a disaster, both for the friends who came in with me, and for the world at large. All that I have seen in your mind confirms this for me now. Opening the city unleashed the undead upon Noroth for thirty years of war, and now it has allowed devils and demons to enter this world without being summoned, to butcher the unwary to make claim on their souls. This is intolerable, and it must end.”
“You want me to end it?” Phin blanched, the thought finally jerking his brain loose from the deep wheel rut in which it had been stuck.
“It needn’t be that hard, Phin. May I call you Phin? Good. You see, when I came here I used spells of gyring to move Vod’Adia out of the state in which it had existed since the Ascension.”
“Since the what?” Phin asked, and Kanderamath frowned.
“Let’s just call it the Cataclysm, shall we? The event fourteen centuries ago that tore the city out of our material world, and slew every living thing herein. To enter the place a millennium later, I first had to set it moving. Turning, if you will. For one lunar month the place was to resume its connection to this world, our world, so that I and my companions could venture inside.”
“Why, why in the world would you do that?” Phin asked.
“Because, Phin, in my day that was the sort of thing we forerunners of your Circle of Wizardry did.” Kanderamath sighed. “We were not the customs agents and messengers of an Empire, but a union of the most powerful magi on two continents. Dedicated to the study of magic for its own sake, not just for the practical applications. We believed in magic not just as a tool, but as an art and a science.”
Phin opened his mouth for another question, but Kanderamath raised a hand.
“Let me speak, Phin, for there is space between the things you must know, and those you only want to know. I caused Vod’Adia to Open so that it could be explored, and perhaps reveal clues as to the nature of the…Cataclysm. But what we found here was the immortal remains of all those souls who had perished a thousand years before, reduced to unholy, undead monstrosities.”
“Like those that emerged at the Second Opening. Those that it took the thirty years of the Dead War to destroy.”
“Exactly like them, for that was the same bunch.” Kanderamath sighed and rubbed a finger on the side of his nose. “When we realized that the place was haunted, to put it mildly, my fellows and I still believed that we had the power to fend off the dead while we conducted our exploration. We had too much faith in our own strength, and not enough appreciation for the fact that the undead do not get tired, or afraid, or concerned for their own casualties. The attacks were unceasing and we were picked off, one at a time. In the end, I alone reached this chamber.”
Kanderamath looked at the spot on the floor from which he had arisen, and Phin had no doubt it was the very spot on which the Witch King had fallen. His shade spoke quietly.
“In my hubris, I had bound my gyring spells to cease only upon my exit from Vod’Adia. When I knew my own death was near and that I would never leave this place, I cast certain spells to become as you see me now. I am not Kanderamath, I am only what is left of him.”