"Father?" he called.

"I am that," came the reply, the voice so strained that Perivel scarcely recognized it.

Perivel found his feet, somehow, the room seeming to tilt and spin crazily around him, and tried to stride forward. It was like stumbling along the deck of a ship pitching in the worst swells of a storm. A red haze seemed to be creeping in around the edges of his vision, and behind him he could see Thamalon clawing his way feebly over the jagged remnants of what had been a gilded chair scant moments before. There was blood all over his brother's face.

"Perivel," the master of Stormweather Towers said calmly from somewhere amid the dust-choked chaos ahead, "stay back." His father's voice was raw with pain and still threaded with a wet bubbling, but at least it sounded like Aldimar Uskevren again.

"Father?" Perivel called, clambering on over shattered furniture, and fumbling vaguely for the sword that didn't seem to be in his hand any more.

"Perivel, keep back."

The snap of command in his father's voice brought Perivel to a halt, blinking and peering. He was in time to see another turret, torn apart by spells, begin its deafening, ground-shaking fall to the earth below. He watched it through a larger opening than before. The row of windows was all gone, and the garden wall that had held them was also missing.

Perivel's thoughts ran on in dull confusion. At some time during his ruminations, as other spells rent the night outside, he fell back to the floor and rolled over to find Thamalon crawling up to him. The youngest Uskevren was blinking at his brother through a mask of blood. Clutched in one of his hands was Perivel's missing sword.

"Brother," he gasped, "I-"

Whatever he might have said next died, forever unspoken, as they heard their father murmur something that began too low to hear, and rose with terrible passion into words they could not understand. It was a surge of rising grief and fury that seemed to pull the floor under them into a matching rise and surge, like a wave racing toward shore.