Better late than never.

So it's a bit rough, but I'm ready to be done with this chapter. Ugh. I did the majority of the writing in the last two days, so if there's something a bit shaky, feel free to point it out.




For four days, the mages worked their way steadily south. Korin and Clara located most of the towns and villages in time to avoid them. They did run across several single houses, but all of those had been long abandoned. The walls crumbled, the roofs were scarcely more than beams, and often some odd stain hinted of bloodshed. The first time they tried to spend the night in one, a thunderstorm nearly pushed the walls over on them. From there on out, they slept in the open, no matter how rocky the ground.

Whatever progress Roxanne made with her language lessons offset her unwillingness to do anything with her staff. When Korin asked her to start the fire, she would pull out the tinderbox just as he had to do. If anyone hinted she might try an easier way, she stared at them and said this was the easiest way she knew.

More, her dreams didn’t seem to be going in the same direction as the Korin and Clara. She never denied having them, but twice she woke screaming and would not say what she had seen. She always looked sour in the mornings. Clara hoped it was simply a result of Roxanne’s rejection of her power, but she was worried that when conflict came the Fire major wouldn’t be able to protect herself.

For Krydor, it was the season of Rain. Isshouri only acknowledged two seasons, but Krydor used six. They had just passed from the drought of Sol. It rained every night and sometimes well into morning. Clara had to revise her timetable to deal with the inevitable delays all that mud introduced. She could keep their feet firm on water, but neither she nor Korin could handle mud very well.

And Korin had other things to worry about.

“You shouldn’t waste your time,” Ben grumbled, shivering as the raindrops rolled from his now-waterproofed clothing. It did nothing to stop his hair from getting wet and dripping under his collar, which made him cold and irritable.

The Earth master ignored him. On their second day in Krydor he had discovered most of the crops were ruined as a result of raiders and brigands. In many places, what was left could never support the number of people trying to make a living from it.

“It will only get ruined again,” Clara had said. “Fine crops are worth more than gold when everyone’s starving.” But she didn’t try to stop him when he spent their noon break in a trance, working magic. Now they paused every time he found another farmer.

“Let him be,” Clara told Ben. She used the break to adjust the straps on her pack and wipe some of the mud from her legs. It only smeared under her hands; she didn’t waste her strength on a spell because in ten minutes they would be just as dirty. “You said you were poor back home. You could try to sympathize with the mothers and fathers who can’t even feed themselves, let alone their children.”

He could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t make him look even worse. Although he had seen some of the destruction, he found it hard to think about the people. Clara had explained a little of Krydor’s history; he thought they could do more good by giving Jarim back to them. If they really did think he was some sort of god, they might rally themselves enough to become a nation again.

What good was it to announce their presence in such a way when they were trying to keep hidden?

But he wasn’t the one stumbling into camp so exhausted he could hardly pull a meal together before passing out. He wasn’t the one offended when he saw trampled grain. Most of all, he wasn’t the one able to hear the cries of the hungry. As long as Korin did everything he’d been doing, Ben’s complaints met with no sympathy from either of the women.

Korin himself seemed to realize Ben only complained out of worry. If Jarim’s presence had troubled him, his absence disturbed Ben twice as much. He had been annoying and invasive, but he had always known when trouble was coming. And in a way, his existence excused Ben from any responsibility when the going got tough. Nobody expected Ben to be able to do anything.

Is this what it’s come down to? he thought bitterly. I’m stuck being grateful because I’m no more than dead weight? My life still depends on their generosity. Dammit, I wish I could just enjoy being pampered, but I suppose I’ve been in charge for too long to go back to being a child.

Korin finished his spells and they started moving again. Though he’d gone white with exhaustion, no one mentioned it. Ben could tell that even under that much strain, Korin was still cheerful. That annoyed Ben too. It didn’t seem fair Korin was going to enjoy working himself to death.

“How many was it this time?” Clara asked.

“I lost count,” he admitted. “It was the largest town we’ve passed so far, so it had more farmland than any of the others. And all of it had been trampled! The plants said someone deliberately raked them over only last week. Whoever it was also sowed a great deal of salt into the fields to interfere with future growth.”

“That doesn’t sound like your typical bandits,” she said, concerned. “Was it sea salt or mined?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t think to check before I got rid of it. Does it matter?”

“Sea salt would imply it came from Isshouri or Baszko, but mined salt is more common of the eastern countries.” She frowned. “It could be Moneit. My parents had mentioned they were concerned Moneit might be moving its army up through Krydor. And if the Mind master lives in Moneit, it gives them another reason to slow our progress.”

“I haven’t seen an army,” Korin yawned. “You can worry about who did it if that helps pass the time. Unless I can catch those people, I don’t really care.”

“Why would Moneit ruin all the fields?” Ben asked. “It might make the people too hungry to resist, but starving people will riot against whoever’s in charge when the food doesn’t come. They would have better luck supplying their own army out of what’s already here and putting some order back into this place.”

“Moneit doesn’t want to rule Krydor,” Clara explained. “It wants to crush Krydor. I told you how the people feel about the Air major over here. The Mind master knows we’re getting close, and possibly encouraged the army to make its move so Jarim would find little to help here.”

“Jarim wouldn’t look for help,” Ben said. Even he knew that much. “How many more days until we reach Moneit?”

“I don’t want to guess until I know how much the mud slowed us down. Climbing hills will be brutal under these conditions, and I know Krydor isn’t flat the whole way across.”



In another two days, they found the hills. The ground rose and fell slowly at first, presenting little additional difficulty, but soon everyone’s legs ached from the constant slopes. Roxanne suffered the most. Although she was used to hard work, none of her chores had included a forced march for several days. It was she, not Korin, setting the pace.

“Why don’t we get a wagon?” she asked one break, rubbing her legs.

“A horse or ox would slip as badly as we do in all this muck,” Clara told her. She purified one of the larger puddles and refilled their canteens. “We’ll just have to walk. It shouldn’t be too much farther, maybe as little as seven days.”

Ben had gone to scout ahead a little, but not so far he couldn’t hear their conversation. Somehow not moving made his legs hurt more than keeping a slow pace. He squinted at the depression below, turned his head to look from the corners of his eyes, and stiffened.

“I think it might be longer,” he said, scrambling back to their small camp. “There’s an army blocking the road up ahead.”

“Army?” Clara demanded. She sent out her power, searching for Water minors and misplaced liquid. What met her senses was such a large area of nothing that she grew suspicious, for all the groundwater cut off in a vertical line. Real water would never do something that neatly.

“Show me,” she told Ben. “Korin, see if you can find them.”

“It’s the same as when Rhonda was torching Roxanne’s house,” he said. “Nothing but fog.”

“I can’t judge as well as you—how much is it hiding?”

“Several acres, at least. And the ground’s turned to marsh on the edges, so we’d have to go a few days before we could find our way around.”

When they reached the top of the hill—somehow everyone had come—they stared into the empty valley. The grass drooped from all of the rain, but not a soul met their sight. Clara and Korin searched with power and again met the fog.

“It’s hiding something,” Clara muttered. “Are you sure it’s an army?”

“Look at it out of the corner of your eyes,” Ben suggested. “Don’t focus on anything.”

“People,” Roxanne confirmed, tilting her head and going cross-eyed. “Lots and lots of people.”

“I still don’t—oh, there they are,” Clara said. “It’s Moneit’s colors under all that mud. They can probably see us from here. We need to get back.”

“Too late!” Ben snapped as the first arrow hissed by his ear. “I’ll buy time. Get out of here.” He took a moment to activate his immunity, then started down the valley. He couldn’t believe he was about to do something so stupid. It was the fear in Roxanne’s face that had convicted him, the fear he’d kept as constant companion. He didn’t want her to live with it too.

It was that sense of responsibility again, pushing him forward even when everything else pushed back. He knew that Korin was too tired to do much, that Clara would find it difficult to work without a source of pure water, that Roxanne might not even know how to deliberately call her power. He told himself he didn’t have a reason to be afraid, but it helped no more than it usually did.

“Don’t get killed.” Clara towed Korin and Roxanne away from the peak and readied her staff. She couldn’t use any of the water on the ground, so she turned her attention to the skies. The humidity thickened when she sent out her power to summon a storm.

As Ben advanced, the mirage faded until he could see the camp without any help. His presence had produced considerable action within the ranks. The four men with bows had trained all their shots on him, and soldiers drew swords or readied spears behind them. A quick estimate counted fifty men.

Despite himself, he was rather impressed at their order. None of them assumed the archers could take him down; they all prepared for the worst.

An arrow thunked solidly into his chest, or rather, the pack he’d forgotten to give to Clara. Ben cursed the hole and pulled it out. It was a bit tricky to figure out how to make his hand just solid enough to grasp, but the consternation on the archer’s face was worth the hassle. He tossed the arrow to the side and kept going.

He’d had all of the delay he was going to take.

A second arrow, a third, a fourth; the shots began to go wild as the men realized nothing they did made any difference. Ben stopped right before he’d cross the first fire, which he figured to be the edge of their camp. The trails between tents had worn so deep he thought this was one of their bases.

“Go home,” he said. “Or let us pass. I don’t care which, but you damn idiots aren’t going to keep me here any longer than absolutely necessary.”

One spear confirmed he was just as immune to the larger weapons; he hadn’t seen who threw it, but he didn’t care. They were afraid now. He’d have to give them more encouragement, though. They were afraid, but none of them backed a single step.

He only saw the Mind minor thanks to a flash of lightning overhead that reflected off the stone’s polished surface. That was when he knew he was in trouble. These men couldn’t hurt him, but what if that staff could make him drop his protection? Worse, what if that staff could make him help them out? Almost without thought, he reached back for the Air staff.

That was a mistake. He swallowed nausea as the staff lit to a blinding glow and took control of the storm. Jarim hadn’t mentioned that it would feel like channeling lightning from the prison to the staff. If he had been able to let go at this point, he would’ve dropped the staff. As it was, he cursed himself for not asking Clara for help.

Jarim targeted the mage first. A bolt of lightning crashed down, charring the man where he stood. The thunder that followed knocked several others over from the sheer force of the sound. Ben tried to tell if any of the others had staffs, but rain pelted down along with the lightning and cut visibility to next to nothing.

That one bolt would have been enough. The soldiers had never expected to see the likes of Ben, and once their mage died they broke ranks to run for cover. But either Jarim knew something Ben didn’t, or he didn’t feel like stopping.

The storm had blown up in full force, spitting out lightning every other breath. It arced in more than straight bolts: it forked as though giant hands reached down from the heavens. Hands with three to seven fingers touched heaven and earth as though to mold them together. They appeared and vanished, formed and reformed, lit the grey and green clouds to white and plunged them back into black. Lightning roiled in sheets and cords, splintering the sky into a hundred pieces.

Jarim harnessed the wind with that storm, but used it mostly to bulk the clouds farther. He didn’t need a breeze to do what electricity could do better.

One by one, the soldiers died. They tripped over the bodies of their comrades, fell face down in the mud, and still the lightning found them. One lash flicked a few of the tents and managed to set even that drenched canvass on fire as Jarim burned out those hiding within.

Ben could smell the charred flesh, but the worst part was that many of the bodies didn’t have a mark on them. Their eyelids froze wide open as their faces twisted into a rictus of agony, and smoke wisped from their mouths.

The last soldier realized he was alone and threw himself on his face before Ben, babbling something the rain drowned out. Or maybe Ben only thought he was surrendering, because Jarim didn’t hold back. That strike raised the hair on Ben’s arms.

After that whatever connection he’d bridged between the staff and Jarim broke as Ben shoved that dream as far as he could from his mind. He had been told what Jarim could do. What Jarim had done. The reality left him chilled and weakened.

He flung the staff into the mud to kneel by the side of the soldier. This had been no more than a teen at best. His blond hair had darkened to black with all the mud, and Ben closed his eyes with a trembling hand. He had not intended to kill children. He had not intended to kill anyone. As irrational as it sounded to himself now, he had only wanted them to move aside.

He sensed rather than saw Clara come up behind him, and though the winds gusted still, the rain had quit. If Jarim still worked the storm, he did so under his own power. Without a staff stirring it up, the weather subsided.

Clara said nothing as she surveyed the extent of the damage. She was too well-trained to give her feelings away in her face or posture, but he could see Korin up on the ridge, horrified. Roxanne wrinkled her nose at all the bodies, then started down the slope to meet them. Ben supposed she found it easy to explain, because to her Jarim was no more than a demon.

And who was Ben to disagree?

“Never again,” Ben said. He stood up, and though his voice was steady, he couldn’t keep himself from shaking. “I’ll let them kill you next time if this is what he does when I let him out. Why the hell are we going to free him anyway?”

“Technically, he had every right to do that,” Clara said, but he could tell she was thinking about something else entirely. “He is a mage of Krydor, and Moneit invaded. It wasn’t like this the other times, Ben. Whatever the Mind master did to lock him in must’ve made him really angry.”

“Angry is no excuse! Why are you all so helpless?” Ben shrieked. “Why is it always me that has to get things done?”

Now she looked at him and grew concerned. “You’re in shock. Sit down before you fall over.”

“Like hell I’m in shock!” he raged. “A madman just used me to kill all these people and you’re sitting there thinking up his excuses! You’re justifying his actions.”

She grabbed his shoulders right before he would have bolted. “I didn’t say it was the right decision,” she told him. “I said he had every right to do that. Ben, this has been war for him far longer than you’ve been alive. As disgusting as you find it, Jarim was acting within the bounds of war. The fastest way to end it is to let him deal with the Mind master himself.”

She must’ve switched languages, because Roxanne caught a good deal of that and laughed. “So we release him to commit another murder? Leave the demon in its cage.”

“You’re forgetting all the things he manages to do even from there,” Clara reminded her. “Now that all the majors are active again, it’s only a matter of time before he finds another set to continue where we left off. And,” she looked at Ben, “if we quit, you’ll never get home.”

“As if I don’t know that already,” he muttered. Now more than ever he wanted to get out of here and back to his crime-ridden neighborhood, where if people died at least he wasn’t the one to kill them or see them dead. But that meant helping Jarim. If he refused, if he stayed, what was he supposed to do? He’d only survived this long because everyone else had supported him.

He glanced back at the body. The sight made him ill, though he wasn’t about to run for a bush to empty his guts. He looked at a soldier that had most likely participated in destroying those crops Korin was trying so hard to save. At a soldier who marched under the Mind master for conquest, not defense. That muddy uniform seemed to sum up everything Jarim found hateful about the entire squadron.

The panic wore off slowly, but the longer he stared the more it lessened. He still didn’t like what Jarim had done, but he could see why he had done it. That in itself made him angry. He didn’t want to sympathize with the monster that had torn him away from everything he had known to live the life of a stranger.

“We should get going,” he said abruptly. “We can still get far before it gets dark, and we don’t want the other parts of the army figuring out what we did to this one.”

By now Korin had joined them. “Aren’t we at least going to bury them?” he asked.

“Dispose of the evidence?” Clara replied. Ben wondered irrelevantly if she could ever manage to stop thinking like a tactician and show some honest emotion. “Their comrades will take care of that much. You’re in no shape to waste power on mud.”

It was a measure of how truly exhausted Korin was that he didn’t argue.



As the days passed, the atmosphere thickened with tension. Korin had to stop healing the fields. He needed the power far more urgently to locate the remaining portions of the army. The Mind mage must have been in regular communication with someone, because within a day and a half of the killings small bands of soldiers began patrolling the countryside.

The Earth mage couldn’t locate the camps as precisely, for they all had the same Mind shield Ben had spotted on the first batch, but he could look for trails that suddenly vanished or appeared. And armies needed a lot of fresh water; Clara kept busy combing the streams and wells for unusual amounts of activity.

Ben and Roxanne, left to themselves, kept to themselves. For a while it was all Ben could do to keep plodding along, when his guilt and anger prodded him to run ahead of everyone. He was angry he had picked up the staff, angry that he felt guilty for Jarim’s crime, angry that Jarim might not care to send him home.

And Roxanne was a difficult person with which to hold a conversation. She was curious about him and his world, but very tight-lipped about her own. Even when she did decide to say something, he got no more than a sentence or two about her home or family, except on the subject of demons.

So the miles passed as the four worked their way steadily south.



“Are we in Moneit yet?” Ben asked. He sat under a tree on the first bit of dry ground he’d seen in days. They’d entered a small forest earlier that day, and the trees perched on the upward slope of the next hill.

“Nearly, if not over the border already,” Clara yawned. “It’s a little hard to tell when we’ve been avoiding the roads. They don’t exactly mark it with a nice painted line.”

“If it wasn’t Moneit, it is now, so what does it matter?” Korin shrugged and moved a few acorns into the ring he’d drawn in the dirt. This was a crude map of the area, with them as a bent twig in the center, and Moneit’s soldiers as rocks, leaves, and acorns. “There’s so many soldiers here they might as well call it Moneit.”

“So how much longer until we find Jarim?”

“Two days, but we have this to deal with first,” Clara said, and waved her hand at the neat rows of rocks and leaves standing between them and the southeastern edge of the circle. Moneit had stationed so many soldiers here it didn’t bother with the invisibility spell. Korin had estimated between five and fifteen hundred troops in all, and most of them were here.

“Clara and I were talking about making a distraction so you could slip through, but they’d expect something like that,” Korin said. “And there’s really too many of them for only the two of us to handle. So we searched for an alternate route.”

“Why do I get chills when you put it like that?”

“Caves,” Clara said, ignoring his moaning. She translated again for Roxanne, who, although coming quite well with her lessons, still had a hard time keeping up. “A long time ago, water carved out a series of caves under the hills. They don’t go all the way past the army, but either Korin or I can carve out the last bit.”

“The entrance is around here,” Korin said, tapping a spot to the west of them on his map. “I’m going to trust Jarim will keep the air fresh, but light could be a problem.”

Roxanne blushed. She wiggled a little in her seat as though she might physically squirm out of it, but eventually bowed her head. “I’ll see what I can do,” she muttered.

Ben frowned and moved one of the closest tokens to the cave’s mouth. “What happens when the Mind master sends someone after us? He might’ve figured out your plan already and have someone waiting.”

“Not possible,” Korin said. “As soon as I found the exits, I collapsed the stone around them, and I sealed the power of my minors in those areas. The only way he’d get in is by digging through twenty feet of rock by hand.”

“Have you found the prison yet? It would be a problem if that’s in the middle of all those soldiers instead of behind them.”

“I found it,” Korin confirmed. “I’m guessing the Mind master put compulsions around it to keep people from getting close, because the earth only remembers one set of footprints in the last two hundred years. I have no idea how far out it extends.”

“What if we can’t get past it?”

Clara broke the uncomfortable silence. “Jarim wouldn’t have sent us here unless he thought we could. It’s also possible we can break his lock without ever standing close to it.”

Korin took the pan off the fire and slid the pancake onto Ben’s plate. Ben had taught him this recipe, longing for some reminder of his home, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. Ben sensed this would be their last meal in a while; underground, even Korin’s power might find it hard to grow things. From what he remembered of caves, they were repositories of bat dung and stone. Clara would have better luck coaxing fish from the water.

In half an hour they finished their meal and broke camp. Ben was surprised at how quickly they found the crumbled rock that marked the cave entrance. Sure enough, several sets of footprints had packed down the dirt, but Korin had done his job well. They had only been able to move a few of the smaller stones and none of the large ones.

“Are they hiding?” Clara asked herself, eyes seeking out every movement. “Korin, see if you can make the wood shelter us before they spring this ambush.”

As soon as Korin shifted his concentration to his staff, an arrow grazed his ear and shattered on the rocks. It would have hit but for the sudden gust of wind that threw it off course. Ben grabbed for the prison dream and stalked forward to draw their fire. He desperately hoped they didn’t have another Mind staff.

At least this time the other majors chipped in to help. No sooner did he see the archer that had aimed at Korin than the man dangled ten feet from the ground, impaled on a branch that had grown through his chest before he had time to get away. Clara had gathered a small globe of liquid—probably from one of their canteens—and held it over another’s nose and mouth.

A volley of arrows crashed down, and all of them passed through his skin without doing the slightest bit of harm. Ben couldn’t see anyone else, but Korin and Clara found them. One of the trees bent over and formed a wooden cage with bars as thick as saplings; the globe abandoned the dead man and zoomed to a new target.

Several years later, it seemed, Clara was calling for him to come back. When he looked, Korin had already cleared the tunnel and was motioning him in. Ben held his ability a little longer just in case and ducked inside.

For the first ten steps, the walls and ceiling pressed in unbearably close. He was glad he wasn’t claustrophobic, but even so it was a relief to find it opened to a room large enough for the four of them.
Korin followed him, closing the rock behind him. It groaned and crashed; Ben wasn’t the only one to wince at the noise.

“Hey, leave a little room for air,” he protested as he saw Korin meant to cut it off as completely as it had been before. “Jarim needs a way to get air in, you know.”

Korin shrugged and punched a hole the size of his fist through to the outside. “Better?” he asked. They could feel the breeze blowing in and Ben let go of the first of his worries.

“You can get the light now, Roxanne,” Clara coaxed. “If it doesn’t work, you’ll have to say something so we can light a torch.”

Roxanne closed her eyes. That way the darkness didn’t seem so close, so frightening. Imagining the column of fire she’d accepted, she timidly asked if it would mind sharing a little of that brilliance with everyone. In all her nightmares, this was the only thing that hadn’t tried to hurt her.

She had to swallow bitterness at the thought that she’d really accepted this demon power. Her father would never acknowledge he even had a daughter, her country had outcast her, and the best she could hope from her future was that Korin or Clara would be willing to shelter her until she could manage on her own.

But . . . home had never held the brilliance of her dreams. She had seen so much magic in the past weeks that the priest would proclaim her eternally damned. In her nightmares she’d done things they could never imagine, and not all of them were evil. On this side of the world, it was no bad thing to be a mage.

It was what her mother would have wanted. Her mother had always told her not to let fear hold her back. She had never called Roxanne a demon.

She could see the light even through closed eyes. When she opened them, she found the entire cave glowing as though it stood in broad daylight. Clara wore a small smile but said nothing as they followed Korin deeper into the earth.



The light never dimmed or wavered, though it always illuminated the room they were in and no other. They passed from the small entry room to a series of much larger caves, all the while heading deeper and deeper underground. The air smelled dank, and the footing was slippery. After the first time he went ankle-deep in muck, Ben stopped looking down. He didn’t want to know.

“There’s so much water down here,” Clara said cheerfully as she put her hand in a trickle that ran out of the rock and into a hole in the floor. “I’ll be able to do a lot with this.”

“Narrow corridor,” Korin warned, squeezing himself through a tunnel half the size he was to get to the next room. Ben got caught and had to activate his ability to walk out, which annoyed him, all the more so when the girls didn’t have any trouble.

Roxanne kept craning her neck to look at the stalactites and stalagmites in the next chamber. Some glowed like precious gems, catching and reflecting her light a hundred times over. She’d never known the world could look like this. Korin smiled and tried to explain what everything was. He taught her the names of the rocks and minerals and broke one of the crystals for her. She tucked it in her pocket, though her hand stole within to stroke it.

“Are these going to be staffs?” she asked once when they passed a particularly large formation. It was true that with a little imagination all of them could see another slender rod of power.

“There’s no magic in them,” Korin replied. “It’s just pretty stones, no more.”

Ben wondered if he dared ask if they were worth anything. It would be nice to go home with diamonds or rubies in his pocket. Then he grinned sourly. It would be nicer to get home at all.

At last they entered a room with only one exit: the river gushing up from the floor. Clara stepped into the water and raised her staff. The ground trembled for several moments and the wall in front of them buckled. She worked slowly enough not to damage the ceiling, but Ben saw chunks of debris floating past.

“It’s mostly hollow around here,” she said when she caught him looking. “All I really need to do is make an opening to the other side. When it rains, the water eats away at the stone and makes these rooms, then drips down to join the river.”

She had to carve one more doorway beyond that before Korin said they were probably close enough to risk going up. He broke the wall at a steep angle, firmed the walls and ceiling of his tunnel, and led the way up.

Ben wasn’t sorry to break into fresh air. Despite not seeing any bats, the caves had stunk of them and their leavings. He checked instinctively for soldiers, but only rock met his eyes. There was little growing over this portion of the hills, for most of the ground was gravel, not soil. The red stone buttressed the sky in a multitude of small hills.

“We’re within the boundary,” Korin panted, collapsing to a seat on the rock. “Anybody get hit with a Mind spell yet?”

“If I did, how would I tell?” Ben grumbled. His legs ached from the last climb, he had a headache from the sun’s glare, and he was starting to get hungry. He doubted the Mind master would waste magic for any of that. “All those spells must be at the border, if they exist at all.”

“We have to keep moving.” Clara hauled Korin to his feet. “Which way to the prison?”

Korin pointed up, where they saw a splinter of rock echoing his gesture. “That’s the highest bit of land, so it should be up there.”

“I don’t see anything,” Roxanne frowned.

“You wouldn’t,” Clara said, and started climbing the steep trail. “Jarim’s not in this world, so it’ll look a bit different.”

Ben nearly passed her; though steep, the rock offered a lot of handholds and proved easy to scale. He didn’t know what he felt, other than dread that they had come this far to find it was impossible. It couldn’t be this easy.

Once all of them had reached the top, they saw it. The stone pushed back in a ring around an area of flat rock as level as cement. In the center of this stage a series of marks had been burned into the stone, a large row of symbols in black and four smaller ones in red, one at each corner of the large.

“Are we supposed to peel this up from the stone?” Clara asked, cautiously kneeling to put her hand over the larger marks. She didn’t quite touch it, but the depression filled with a black liquid that lashed out at her. She yanked the Water major between them. With a sharp crack, the ooze vanished and the staff soaked everyone in a wave.

“Did it need a sign to say don’t touch this?” Ben grumbled, wringing the water from his shirt. “That could’ve killed you, and then we’d have to hare after your successor.”

“I’m flattered you care so much about me,” she retorted in good humor. “At least now we know it’s going to fight back.”

“But how does it work?” Korin asked, fingering his staff. “I’ve never seen anything like this, and I don’t think the Earth staff knows either.”

“Maybe we’re supposed to try to erase the marks?” Clara suggested.

“So we’re supposed to go ahead and irritate that thing again?” Ben snorted. He took out the Air staff reluctantly and pointed it at the marks. Nothing happened. Gritting his teeth, he touched the prison dream. Eventually he let go, disappointed and relieved. “I guess Jarim has nothing to say about it.”

Clara looked from the marks to him and back again. “What do you have to say about it?”

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“What do they say?” She traced a modified version of one of the symbols in front of her in the drying puddle her staff had left. “The marks themselves must mean something. Isshouri’s written language looks a little bit like this, though it isn’t the same. Or doesn’t your ability extend to reading and writing?”

“It’s let me read signs and menus.” He put down the his bag and sat on it, staring at the marks. They were just pictures, weren’t they? Meaningless scribbles to draw bars on Jarim’s prison. Even if they were words, why should he be able to read them? Nothing before now had taken any effort; it had just happened.

Clara added a final line to her doodle and he nearly fell over. Perhaps because he had seen her draw it, he still saw the actual symbol rather than its English equivalent. But he understood it. She’d sketched Air.

When his eyes darted back to the row of strange symbols, he could feel something shift inside his thoughts, like the sensation of looking at a meaningless block of colors and seeing a three-dimensional picture pop out.

“They’re words, somewhat,” he said, struggling to put what he saw into words. “At least, it’s a complicated way to write things so magic will stick to it.”

He paused, horrified. Had he actually implied he understood a spell? It had to be Jarim’s knowledge leaking through. Ben Harrison didn’t know anything about magic.

If Clara noticed his crisis, she ignored it. “Thought so,” she said, drawing a second symbol next to her first. “What do they say?”

“It’s one of those words made up out of other words. The big word spells out Jarim’s name. The little words . . . Loss. Binding. Insanity. Air. Pain. Wall. Death.” He pointed to each as he said it. “The small marks around the outside must be the new spell, because it just echoes back more of the same.”

“That’s an interesting curse,” Korin said, pacing in front of the name as though simply looking at it would help him figure it out. “It doesn’t say anything about where Jarim went, but at least we know what’s holding him in.”

“So how do we break it?” Roxanne asked after Clara explained what they’d found.

“You said it’s his name, right?” Korin walked over to Clara’s doodles and traced them in stone as though he was drawing in dust. “Do you think we could rewrite it?”

“There’s bound to be another set of words that spell his name,” Clara agreed. “It could work.”

Ben held up his hands. “Wait a minute. I can read these things, and probably write them, but I can’t just spell his name and show you the combinations. My language doesn’t work like that. I’d need to have the words before I could try spelling them out.”

“Fair enough,” Clara conceded. “Try freedom.”

“And don’t ask me how to stick magic to them,” Ben grumbled as he drew. He kept his eyes on the runes; if he looked he knew he’d write in English. When he looked at the result he shook his head. “Won’t work. It’ll make the wrong sound.”

“One of them was binding, right? Try unbinding, or unbound,” Korin suggested. That proved unsuccessful as well.

“What about modifying the binding symbol to unbinding?” Clara asked. She seemed to be enjoying the challenge.

“How would you modify death?” Roxanne asked, more curious than sarcastic.

“If you want to modify anything, you’ll have to erase lines.” Ben pointed to the binding-unbinding runes. “And you’ll probably have to make new lines the same way the originals were made, or all the power is going to stay in the originals.”

“This was made by a Mind mage.” Korin wiped the sweat from his forehead as he thought. “What did he use? Mind staffs aren’t like the elementals; they can only cast their spells on something that thinks. How did he write that in the first place?”

“Maybe that’s Jarim.” Roxanne shrugged when they all looked at her. “Well, that’s what it says it is, right?”

“Jarim is a row of text,” Ben said. His voice was flat because he was trying very hard not to laugh at the thought of the great Air master as someone that had been written into a stone book. “Look, I’ve seen where he is. Sight and sound and everything else don’t exist there, and if he had a wall he’d probably kiss it because it’s the only thing in there apart from himself. The only thing he can do is use this weird touch . . . that is, if any of that really is him.”

“It sounds like a Mind spell, if you think about it,” Clara said. “The Mind master blocked off all his senses, but he either forgot or didn’t know Jarim had that one. Maybe he’s buried underneath here and dreaming all that.”

“There’s nothing but solid rock until the caves start bubbling up, and nothing alive or dead in any of those,” Korin said. “No, I think Roxanne has a point. That could be Jarim.”

“The dragons and Jarim told us to just blast it, though.” Clara tapped her staff and pointed it at the words. “If that is him, it sounds a bit reckless. If Jarim won’t or can’t lead the way, just what are we supposed to blast?”

“How would be nice, too,” Korin added. “I don’t know about you, but I have no idea how to use magic except through the earth. I can do whatever you want to the ground underneath those marks, but I’m not sure I can affect the marks themselves.”

“Oh, please,” Ben snorted. “You’ve got a major staff. Why not try?”

“But even Jarim didn’t do that,” he protested. “There’s got to be something we’re missing.”

Ben let them bicker and tried to swallow his anger. He was so close to leaving forever, and then the world had to throw something like this at him. It wasn’t fair. This looked like a problem that could take a while to solve.

As he let his mind wander, he doodled more runes in an effort to make himself look busy. By now the water had dried up, but it had deposited a thin layer of dirt. He tried random words and phrases. He even tried describing the prison and his own home. The only words that might fit into another version of Jarim’s name didn’t look very helpful.

He looked back at Clara’s drawings. Yes, her symbol for Air and this had a lot of similarities. They both described the Air major with nearly the same curved lines, though hers had several dots and dashes the other lacked.

Both of them described the Air major . . . what described Jarim? From what Ben had seen and heard, he defined himself through his power. Jarim d’Maer, master of the Air major. That was all the introduction he’d ever given, as though that alone explained everything. And maybe it did: the only normal word in the entire set binding him mentioned that staff. The power was all he had left.

Idly, Ben traced the rune for the Air major again and rubbed it out. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water had all gathered here. He drew the symbols on top of each other, but all it left him was a mess. Smearing himself a clean slate, he drew Air instead of the Air major and looked down to see the result.

And nearly jumped out of his skin. Oh, he could see the lines and curves that made the deceptively simple word. Behind that, he saw a face a little older than Roxanne, a young man with dark blond hair and blue eyes.

The image flickered and vanished, but left him with no doubt as to what he’d seen. “I found it,” he had to say several times before his shell-shocked whisper got Roxanne’s attention. How could that be Jarim? Wasn’t he older than Ben by over a hundred and fifty years? It was only the recognition in those eyes that convinced him otherwise.

After he’d explained as much as he could to the others, who didn’t see the vision no matter how they squinted, Clara asked him what they needed to do with it.

“Carve this one into the rocks instead, I would think,” was all he could say. “He’s a kid, Clara. A damn kid. What did he do to get himself in that much trouble?”

“Ask him yourself once he’s out,” she replied. “Why don’t you try reaching for him again?”

Ben closed his eyes and summoned his dreams. This time he could feel Jarim’s magic crossing that bridge to his staff. The power pulled him forward until he held the staff over the seven runes of the curse.

“I think this is where you chip in,” Ben said when an arc of lightning snapped from the staff and burned the symbol for Air over the curse, right on top of the symbol for the Air major but several times larger. Clara managed to get a smooth stream of power to join after a few fumbling tries, and the two of them attracted Earth like a magnet.

Roxanne hesitated for a moment longer, then offered her staff. She didn’t even have to cast, for the power sprang out and completed the rune.

The curse bubbled up with the black liquid again, but it never splashed above the lip of the words. The four streams of power blended into one bar of white light and pushed against whatever those seven symbols held closed.

Ben wanted to throw the staff down. With each moment that passed, he could feel Jarim getting closer and closer. What if they had been wrong assuming Jarim’s body lay trapped behind this curse? It had been two hundred years—what if only his mind had survived, and his return simply meant making his possession of Ben’s body permanent?

Eventually he shut his eyes against the power. It was the only way he could hold off the terrible lure to step directly into the fizzing mess of strands, which he knew would kill him. Instinctively he knew the curse was calling to him in an effort to protect itself. He thought of home. He visualized every dent that had been in his car before Rhonda had gotten her rotten staff on it. But he had to balance those thoughts with the prison dream, lest he accidently shut Jarim off before it finished.

And then his prison dream became reality. His eyes popped open when he failed to hear the hiss of power, Korin’s ragged breathing, the wind gusting through rock teeth. He could see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing.

“You can’t have me,” he growled to the world at large and focused everything he had on getting home.

The nothingness tore like rotting silk, and he wondered if he had only imagined himself there, for it unfolded around a body that lay in the center of the curse. The black lines of the curse shriveled more every moment, but so did their power. When the nothingness vanished, both sets of magic went out, taking with the curse and its counter. The ground showed no mark at all.

“Take your damn staff!” Ben shouted, and chucked the Air major at the Jarim. He hoped it would hit, but Jarim’s hand snagged it without needing direction from his eyes. Like an invalid after a long disease, he pushed himself up into a seat.

Physically, Jarim didn’t stand out. He would probably stand shorter than Korin by several inches. His blond hair was so dark as to be almost brown, and he wore it long and ragged, as though he had not ever found the time to get a proper haircut. Though he had a young face, trouble had etched several lines in his skin. It was hard to see how anyone could think him so dangerous he’d been imprisoned behind all that magic.

When he opened his eyes, tears dripped down his nose and into the dirt. He stared into the sky, at the stone circle, at the four of them. No one said anything. Roxanne was too frightened, Clara cautious, Korin exhausted. Ben kept quiet because he didn’t trust himself to stop at words if he started spilling everything he’d stored up over this journey.

“Free,” Jarim croaked, touching his arm gently as though he wasn’t sure if his body would vanish. Ben wondered if his own voice had been so high when Jarim spoke through him. He had a pleasant accent, though.

“May I be the first to say I can’t believe that worked,” Clara said, and offered her hand to Jarim with a smile. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person.”

He needed the help to stand, although he visibly strengthened moment by moment. The wind scurried around him. It played with his clothes and hair as though it wanted to make sure he was real, too. Jarim regarded it and everything else with his starved blue eyes. Roxanne shifted uncomfortably when he caught her gaze, but stared defiantly back.

Ben did more than stare. “When you’re done looking, send me home,” he growled. “I’ve had enough of your games.”

The ghost of a smile touched Jarim’s lips. “Not yet. I need the power to kill the Mind master first. Then I’ll cast that spell.”

“Are you interested in revenge?” Korin asked. He admitted to himself he’d miss the rest of the group if they split up, but he wasn’t going to continue if Jarim only wanted to kill people. He wanted to get started on his garden. It might be nice to wander the world for a few more years to find the perfect spot.

“Revenge? Yes. Oh, yes.”

“But this can’t possibly be the same Mind master that caught you,” Clara protested. “He’d have to be at least as old as you are.”

“Three hundred and twelve,” Jarim said. “Older.”

“How does that work?” she asked. “I assume your environment preserved you, but how did he hold off death for so long?”

“Easily. I copied him in order to protect you earlier.” He shook it off as Clara was still trying to figure that out. “I will only stay the night. You don’t have to put up with me any longer than it takes me to regain all my strength.”

Somehow the way he said it turned it from a polite protest into a bit of an insult. Roxanne tugged on Korin’s sleeve for a translation, frustrated she couldn’t understand anything about what was going on. He whispered an explanation, although her limited vocabulary forced him to leave a lot out.

“If you wouldn’t mind, though, we have a lot of questions for you,” Clara said. “You know far more than we do about magic and just about everything else.”

“That’s fine. But before I forget—Ben, don’t count on being able to walk through things any longer. You only had that ability because it touched my prison, and now that I’m free it won’t work.”

Ben stared at Jarim, words failing him. He thought he’d been born with that ability, for he’d had it as long as he could remember. What threads of fate bound him to this man, and why did he get the feeling he hadn’t severed the last of them?

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Notes: Whoo... I wanted to do more with that spell to free Jarim, but by that point I was just about out of ideas. I'd like to go back and put in a paragraph from someone else's point of view, because they're obviously going to experience it a bit differently. It's hard to believe I've gotten so far. The only challenge now will be drawing out the last chapter long enough so that it's not five pages.

I will go more into the Mind master's longevity next chapter, no worries. But if you're looking forward to Jarim's comeuppence, that won't come until next book. And I think I'm either going to dual-update to get Phoenix/Ricky done, or start on a different novel. It feels like I've been working on Ben for a loooong time.



Well, since I've technically posted Phoenix, I think Ricky should be next. Only problem is I still haven't worked through some of those hangups. I think I'll take a break for a day or two first. I need non-writing time right now. *dies*