She hadn't heard him return to her from his investigation of the building's outer court: he was a silent-moving man. Pitched for her hearing alone, his voice was of a curious velvety roughness, like dark bronze broken by time. In the shadows of the crumbling wall, and the deeper concealment of his hood, his blue eyes seemed very bright. "But there is something."

"Oh, yes." Ingold Inglorion, Archmage of the wizards of the West, had a way of listening that seemed to touch everything in the charred and sodden waste of the city around them, living mid dead. "I suspect," he added, in a murmur that seemed more within her mind than outside of it, "that it has stalked us since we passed the city walls."

He made a sign with his hand, small, but five years travel with him in quest of books and objects of magic among the ruins of cities populated only by bones and ghouls had taught her to see those signs. Gil was as oblivious to magic as she was to ghosts-or fairies, or UFOs, for that matter she would have added-but she could read the summons of a cloaking spell, and she knew that Ingold's cloaking spells were more substantial than most people's houses. Thus what happened took her completely by surprise.

The court was a large one. Thousands had taken refuge in the house to which it belonged, in the fond hope that stout walls and plenty of torchlight would prevent the incursion of those things called only Dark Ones. Their skulls peered lugubriously from beneath dangling curtains of colorless vines, white blurs in shadow. It was close to noon, and the silver vapors from the city's slime-filled canals were beginning to burn off, color struggling back to the red of fallen porphyry pillars, the brave blues and gilts of tile. More than half the court lay under a leprous blanket of the fat white juiceless fungus that surviving humans called slunch, and it was the slunch that drew Gil's attention now.