Aide loved this town , he thought, surveying the leprous desolation before him. She was raised here; it was part of the life she loved, before the Dark... and before me .

Rudy hoped she would never have to see it as it was now.

He shifted his staff to his other hand-the six-foot, crescent-pronged staff that had once belonged to the Archmage Lohiro-and checked the weapon that hung holstered at his side. It was the only one of its kind, like a glass and gold Flash Gordon zap-gun-a hand flame thrower that could spit a thirty-foot column of fire. If he must enter the realm of the Dark, Rudy had resolved to enter it prepared.

The silence that hung over the town was frightening. Fog covered it like pewter darkness, masking the broken walls and fallen columns in opal veils of mystery. But it was not a dead silence that prickled Rudy's hair and made him strain his eyes to pierce the mists. It was a silence that lived and watched.

Like a thickening of smoke, Ingold faded into being at his side. "This way," he murmured, his voice scarcely louder than the skittering of rats' feet on the broken stones before them. "Kara tells me the main path to the Palace is blocked. We can go by way of the Street of Oleanders."

Other forms materialized-Kara of Ippit and the withered little hermit Kta, who had included himself, over Ingold's protests, in the expedition at the last minute. Kara whispered, "I didn't like the look of that street. It looked almost as if-as if a wall had been built across it out of rubble."