Ilse Witch

Then everything went black.

Bek glanced over at the strained, frightened face of Ryer Ord Star and smiled reassuringly as they moved with the others of the company through the deepening gloom. The rain had turned to a fine mist. The seer blinked against the droplets that gathered on her eyelids, and brushed at her face with her sleeve. She moved closer to Bek.

The boy peered left and right to where the groups led by Quentin and Ard Patrinell navigated the misted ruins. He caught a glimpse of his cousin and the Captain of the Home Guard, but found no sign of Ahren Elessedil. The buildings were growing larger now and took longer to get around. At times the searchers were separated by walls fifty feet high and would catch only momentary glimpses of one another through sagging doors and burned-out entries. The buildings were all the same, either empty or full of rusted machinery. In some, banks of casings sat in long rows, studded with dials and tiny windows that resembled the blank, staring eyes of dead animals. In some, machines so large they dwarfed the searchers hunkered down like great beasts fallen into endless slumber. Shadows filled the open spaces, layering machines and debris alike, stretching from one building to the next, a dark spiderweb tangled through the city.

He looked again for Ahren, but everyone in the Elven Hunter group looked pretty much the same, hooded and cloaked against the damp. A sudden wave of fear and doubt washed over him. He forced his gaze back to Walker, who was striding just ahead. He was being stupid. It was probably the look on Ryer Ord Star’s face that infused him with such uneasiness. It was probably the day, so dark and misted. It was probably this place, this city.

In the silence and gloom, you could imagine anything.

He thought about the books that Walker had come to find and was troubled anew. What would the people of the Old World be doing with books of spells? No real magic had been practiced in that time. Magic had died out with the Faerie world, and even the Elves, who had survived when so many other species had perished, had lost or forgotten virtually all of theirs. It was only with the emergence of the new Races and the convening of the Druids at Paranor that the process of recovering the magic had begun. Why would Walker believ1e that books of magic from before the Great Wars even existed?

The more he worried over the matter, the more obsessed with it he became. Soon he found himself wondering about the creature that had lured them here. Ostensibly to steal their magic, it seemed—yet if it already had books of magic at its disposal, why not use these? Surely they were written in a language it could understand. What was it about the magic that Walker and Quentin and he possessed that was so much more attractive? What was it that had doomed Kael Elessedil’s expedition thirty years earlier? He could repeat everything that Walker had told him, had told them all, and still not get past this gaping hole of logic in the Druid’s explanation.

They passed through a cluster of large empty warehouses into a section of low, flat platforms that might have been buildings or something else entirely. Windowless and sealed all about, they appeared to lack any purpose. Pitted with rust and streaked with patches of moss and lichen, they shimmered in the rain like huge ruined mirrors. Walker took a moment to study one, placing his hands on its surface, closing his eyes in concentration. After a moment he stepped away, shook his head at the others, and motioned for them to continue on.

The platform buildings disappeared behind them in the mist. Ahead, a broad metal-carpeted clearing that was studded with odd-shaped walls and partitions materialized out of the gloom. The clearing stretched away for hundreds of yards in all directions, and dominated the surrounding buildings by virtue of its size alone. The walls and partitions ranged in height from five to ten feet and ran in length anywhere from twenty to thirty more. They were unconnected to each other, seemingly placed at random, seemingly constructed without purpose. They did not form rooms. They did not contain furniture or even machinery. Here, unlike the surrounding warehouses, there was no rubble. Or plants, grasses, and scrub. Everything was swept clean and smooth.

At the center of the square, barely visible through the gloom, an obelisk rose more than a hundred feet. A single door opened into it, massive and recessed, but the door was sealed. Above this entryway, a red light blinked on and off in steady sequence.