He looked again, releasing all thoughts of striving from his soul. The metal twinkled once more, and he caught the long swirl of a cape brushing sand, the scuff of a foot above the tide line. Like a sudden wash of spilling opals, the stroke of a wave eradicated footsteps from the sand. The man whose prints they were walked slowly on, and Rudy could see the starlight now on his bright gold hair hair the colour of sun-fire.

It surprised him, for he had expected the Archmage Lohiro to be old.

But this man wasn't. He was surely less than forty, with a young, clean-shaven face. Only the firm lines of the mouth and the creases in the corners of eyes that were a flecked and changeable kaleidoscope blue betrayed the harshness of experience. His

hand around the hard, gleaming wood of his staff reminded Rudy of Ingold's hand, nicked with the scars of sword practice, very deft and strong. The staff itself was tipped with a metal crescent some five inches across, whose inner edge glinted razor-bright. The starlight caught in it, as it caught in those wide blue eyes and on the spun-glass glimmer of foam that washed the beach in a surge of lace and dragged at something half-buried in the sand.

Looking down, Rudy saw that it was a skeleton, old blood still staining the raw bones, crabs crawling gruesomely through the wet, gleaming eyes of the skull. The Archmage barely turned his steps aside from it. The hem of his dark cloak brushed over it as he passed and swept the sand as he went down the beach.

Rudy sat back, cold with sweat and suddenly terrified. The light died out of the crystal below him, leaving the room pitch-dark but for the bluish echo in its heart. Then he heard a sound, faint and distantly booming, a vibration that seemed to shake the Keep to the dark, ancient bones of its agelong foundations.

Thunder, Rudy thought.

Thunder? Through ten-foot walls?

His stomach seemed to close in on itself. He got up and headed quickly for the door. A second booming reverberated through the Keep, setting up a faint, sinister ringing in the metal junk heaped in the corners and shivering in the mighty walls.

Rudy began to run.