Masques (Sianim #1)(60)

"Kai was not only good enough to get the pot, he also painted a white 'X' on the back of every one of the guards without them knowing it."

"Wow! Can you do that, Stanis?" asked Tobin.

"Aralorn," Myr said quietly, putting his hand on her shoulder.

She turned from watching Stanis preen under the attention. "What's wrong?" Myr looked a bit pale.

"It's Wolf. He's in the library. I think that you need to see if you can calm him down."

* * *

THE LIBRARY WAS ENGULFED IN SHADOWS WHEN SHE CAUTIOUSLY peered into it; it felt warmer than usual. The only light came from Wolf's staff, which glowed a dull orange. Wolf sat in his usual chair, motionless. Only the scorched smell in the library suggested that the scene wasn't as peaceful as it looked.

Using her own magic, Aralorn lit the chamber. One of the bookcases was nothing but ashes on the cave floor. Thoughtfully, Aralorn wandered over to it and kicked the ashes. The bookcase next to her burst into flames and was reduced to the same state before she even felt the heat. She winced at the destruction of the irreplaceable books.

"Runyons, Wolf," she asked in calculatedly exasperated tones, "isn't this hard enough without losing your temper?" She turned to look at him. He wore his mask again.

"I have it, Aralorn," he murmured softly. "I have the power to do anything." Another bookcase followed the first two. "If I didn't have so much yawaning power, I just might be able to do something with it. There's a spell here to remove the ability to use magic from a magician who is misusing his power. I can't use it. If I tried, we'd have another glass desert on our hands." His eyes glittered with the fires of his magic.

Aralorn went to him and sat on the floor beside him, resting her head against his knees. "If you had less power, there would be no way to take the ae'Magi. You would never have been able to free yourself from the binding spells that keep all of the other magicians bound to his will. There would be no one to resist him. Quit tearing yourself into pieces and winning the battle for the ae'Magi. You are who you are. No better and no worse."

It was quiet for a long time in the library. Aralorn let her light die down and sat in the darkness with Wolf for a long time. No more bookcases burned in magic fire. When Wolf's hand touched her hair, Aralorn knew that it would be all right.

* * *

ARALORN TROTTED UP THE TUNNELS AT A STEADY PACE, walking now and again when she ran out of breath - which she fell was far too often. Slowly, though, her strength was coming back, and she had to stop less frequently today then she had the day before. Morning and night for The past four days, she had run the tunnels from the library to the entrance, trying to rebuild the conditioning that she'd lost.

Her path was free of people for the most part. The library was quite a distance from the main caves, and most of the refugees respected Wolf's claim that the Old Man of the Mountain wanted to keep them out of the tunnels, Aralorn was of the opinion that Wolf didn't want to spend his time searching for lost wanderers, because she'd seen no sign that the Old Man objected to anyone's presence. Although the path to the library was carefully marked out and considered part of the "occupied" caves, it was seldom that anyone besides Aralorn, Wolf or Myr went there.

The few times someone came to the library with a message, they looked nervous traveling the dark tunnels. Wolf said that they were waiting for the wrath of the Old Man to full on them. Myr said that it was Wolf, not the Old Man, that they were frightened of - Myr was probably right.

The two nobles had ignored the ban on the inner caves twice. The first time Myr brought them back. The second time Wolf went after them. Wolf wouldn't tell her what he'd done to them, and neither of them volunteered information, but they came back white-faced and had been remarkably subdued ever since.

As she came to the outer caves, Aralorn slowed to a walk. There were too many people around for her to dodge at a faster speed. When she started down the path that led to the entrance, the first thing that she noticed was the sound of her own footsteps. It took her a minute to realize that the reason she could hear them was because the Uriah weren't howling.

Sure enough, when she reached the entrance, the only evidence of the flaming barrier was the pile of Uriah bodies that lined the outside of the cave. The bonfire Myr had ordered laid near the entrance was still unlit. Other than the bodies, there was no sign of the Uriah or the barrier that had kept them out.

She stepped around the corpses, moving cautiously to see if there were any lying in wait. After so many days in the caves, the sunlight nearly blinded her. The air smelled fresh and pure, without the distinctive odor that accompanied Uriah. Only a slight burnt smell marred the fragrance of the nearby pine.

The source of the singed smelt wasn't only the corpses in the cave. It looked as if a ball of fire had been spewed from the cave's mouth, A blackened path in the grass and soil began from the entrance and traveled in a straight line a fair distance before disappearing. Within the blackened area were ten or fifteen bodies of Uriah. They were in much worse condition than the bodies in the cave, as if they had been gnawed upon by a large scavenger.

Aralorn followed the burnt path up the mountain and found that the trail abruptly slopped on a wide, Hat area. She started back and was several lengths down the slope when she realized that she might be thinking backward. What if the fireball hadn't come from the cave, but had been launched at it? Muttering to herself, she trotted back to where the trail had stopped.