Matteo glanced from the wizard to the ghostly jordain and back. "I'm not sure which of you is paler," he quipped.
"I'm not the one casting the spell," Andris responded. "Lord Basel has the responsibility of sending you in. My only task is welcoming you back." He spoke stoutly, refusing to acknowledge the possibility that Matteo might not return. The two friends clasped wrists, then fell into a brief embrace.
Matteo stepped back and nodded to Basel. The wizard began the chanting of the spell. It was a complex thing, a strange and jagged melody that sounded sinister even in Basel's pleasant, untrained baritone.
A high-pitched, eerie wind began to whistle through Matteo's thoughts, swiftly growing into gale force. The powerful wind drove him back toward the conical hill. Yet the gathering storm was for him alone-the winds did not touch the other men. Andris lifted a translucent hand in farewell.
Suddenly the Nath was gone, and Matteo was hurled into a chill, gray world. He hit and rolled, quickly coming up into a battle-ready crouch, his jordaini daggers drawn and ready.
There was no need-he was alone. In fact, as he scanned the rock-strewn moor around him, Matteo saw no other sign of life. There were no birds crawling across the pewter-colored sky, no scurrying voles amid the dull grasses, not even the hum and chirp of insects.
Yet strange images seemed to swirl through the air, and voices lurked beneath the silence. There was more to this place than Matteo's eyes could perceive-he was certain of that. The magic here was so thick, so foreign to Halruaan magic, that even he could perceive its presence.
He wondered, briefly, what he might see through the eyes of a dark fairy. This misty moor was some sort of magical antechamber, no more real than a dream.
The ground beneath him was damp and thickly covered by moss, and as he walked the spongy surface seemed to absorb his energy. Certainly it slowed his steps. The mist thickened, until he could see no more than a few paces ahead. He called Tzigone's name, but sound did not seem to carry much farther than sight could reach.
Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a solid fist flashed into Matteo's face. There was no time to evade, so he took the punch, turning his head with the blow rather than bracing against it. He seized a handful of coarse linen and pulled his assailant down with him. They were evenly matched in size, and for several moments Matteo struggled to pin the man. When he did, he gazed down into a furious face, one disconcertingly like his own.
"Benn," he said in astonishment, recognizing the young peasant.
"Why did you bring me here?" the peasant demanded. Guilt surged as Matteo considered this question. Was it possible that he had truly dragged the young man into this grim place? Had his jordaini resistance to magic distorted Basel's spellcasting?
The man began to struggle. "Haven't you and yours done enough?"
"It was not my choice," Matteo said earnestly. "I never meant you any harm."
"How many people have to pay for your jordaini honors?" inquired a soft, almost toneless female voice.
Matteo released Benn and staggered to his feet, stunned by the sudden appearance of the small, listless woman he had met but once. He quickly inclined his head in the traditional bow of respect to a wizard-for this is what his mother had been, before his birth had reduced her to this state.
"My lady, you took your own path," Matteo said respectfully. "I regret where it has brought you, but the choice was never mine to make."
The woman's eyes seemed to stare right through him. "It is cold here," she muttered, as if she had heard nothing Matteo said.
He moved closer. "Vishna never told me your name," he said softly.
A puzzled expression crossed her face, bringing another stab of guilt and pain to the young jordain's heart. His birth mother had lost so much of herself that she could no longer remember her own name!
Another possibility occurred to him. Perhaps his mother did not know her name because he did not know it. Tentatively he reached out to the small woman. His hand lowered to her shoulder and went through. She was no more substantial than the mist.
Matteo whirled toward the peasant. Benn was gone. Indeed, he had never truly been there.
The jordain took a long, unsteady breath and considered his situation. These disturbing encounters were illusions somehow plucked from his own mind. Apparently the Unseelie folk had no trouble bypassing his jordaini resistance!
On a logical level, Matteo knew he bore no guilt for his mother's decision or for the children lost to the young peasant and his wife. These were choices made by others. Vishna had often warned him not to take responsibility where there was none, telling him that it was a form of pride.
Pride, Matteo suspected, could be his downfall here.
He held out his hands, fisted them, and turned them this way and that. His own form seemed nearly as wraithlike as that of his unfortunate mother. A moment of panic gripped him. If he could not count on his strength and his warrior skills, all was lost!
Pride again, he realized. As a jordain, he had dedicated his life to developing the strength of mind and body, but here, logic had little footing. And strength? Matteo lifted a hand to his jaw. It ached from the blow Benn's image had dealt him. Here illusion ruled. The calm, pragmatic certainty of a jordain was as out of place here as the white robes of Mystra on a tavern doxie.
Soft, mocking laughter sang softly through the mists, coming at him from all sides. Matteo snatched out his daggers and whirled this way and that, watching for the attack. No dark fairies came, and as he considered the sound, he realized that the voices sounded more mortal than fey, that they were all the same voice. The laughter was a young man's, deep in pitch and derisive in tone.
With a sudden jolt, Matteo recognized the sound of his own voice. His disembodied thoughts had taken wing and were mocking him.
"Calm certainty," he said, repeating in disgust the description of himself. This was as much an illusion as anything he had encountered! For nearly a year, since the day Kiva had entered his life and shattered his assumptions, he had been wracked with doubts about the jordaini order. He was no fit jordain, no matter what comforting lies he told himself.
A sudden bright truth came to him-a moment of epiphany that turned a year of turmoil on its head. Perhaps certainty was not the reward of faith, but the opposite of it! Perhaps faith meant keeping on, despite doubts. He had done that, and he would continue to do so. His doubts did not invalidate his life's task; paradoxically, they confirmed it
The laughter died away. Matteo permitted himself a smile at this small triumph, then marshaled his thoughts and focused on his lost friend. If the mind was so powerful in this place, perhaps he could conjure Tzigone by force of will.
He almost tripped over her small, huddled form. With a glad cry, he sank to the ground and gathered her into his arms.
The jordain was not prepared for the jolt of power that sizzled over him. Somehow, he managed to keep his hold on the girl. The strange magical surge enveloped them both, sending their hair crackling around their faces and scorching their garments. The tattered remnants of Tzigone's apprentice robe blackened and steamed, but she herself seemed unhurt. Matteo blessed the jordaini resistance that protected them both.
Tzigone's enormous brown eyes searched Matteo's face, registering but not quite accepting his presence. She looked dazed, and her smile was a faint ghost of her old insouciant grin.
"Mind if I smoke?" she said, batting away the curling wisps that rose from her singed clothes.
Perhaps it was surprise, perhaps the tension of their surroundings, but Tzigone's remark struck Matteo as wonderfully absurd. He laughed aloud from the sheer delight of having his friend back.
The wry half-smile dropped off Tzigone's face. "I knew it," she muttered, disconsolate. "You're an illusion. The real Matteo has less sense of humor than a slug."
"Somehow, I can't be offended," he said, still grinning.
"Tell me about it," she grumbled. "Goddess knows, I've tried!"
"It's me," he insis
ted as he framed her small face with both hands, "and I can prove it. Do you remember when we were chased by the wemic?"
A smirk tweaked her lips. "You thought wemics could climb trees, seeing that the bottom half of them is lion. Would you be frightfully disappointed, dearest illusion, to learn that griffin kittens can't purr?"
"Do you remember this?" he persisted. Before she could respond, he bent down and gently kissed her lips. Nothing of this nature had ever passed between them-surely she would have to know this was no memory-conjured illusion.
Tzigone's eyes widened, and a familiar, urchin grin spread across her face like a quirky sunrise. "It is you! It has to be! Who else could possibly believe a kiss like that would be worth remembering?"
She hurled herself into his arms, clinging to him with a fervor that belied her teasing words.
The Unseelie mists deepened around them, and the chill seemed to sink into Matteo's bones. With sudden certainly, he realized that the magic had indeed slipped inside him, trying to find something to twist and control and torment.
Suddenly he was intensely aware of the girl in his arms in a way he had never been before. The heat and the need were compelling, disturbing.
He searched his heart for the truth of this. There had been moments when he was intensely aware of Tzigone as female, and he had felt an occasional twinge of intrigued curiosity. But that was not the heart of their friendship.
This triumph was short-lived, for a sudden heaviness settled upon him-the obsessive weight of the debts that first shaped and defined their relationship. He glanced down and noted Tzigone regarding him with an equally troubled expression. On impulse, he decided to turn this latest test into a joke.
"You take your debts seriously," Matteo reminded her. "If I get you out of here, the price will be an entire year without any infraction of Halruaan law."
She wriggled out of his arms. "Before you talk about price, you need to see something."
Matteo followed her through the mist, keeping close on her heels for fear of losing her.
She stopped abruptly and turned to him. "Dhamari is gone. I think I know why." She stepped aside, giving Matteo a full view of the mist-veiled horror.
A Crinti woman sat propped against a steep-sided conical mound, her head lolling to one side. Her face was black with dried blood. Where her eyes had been were dark, empty holes.
"She tore them out with her fingernails," Tzigone said dully. "Whatever she saw here was more than she could face. Dhamari is gone, and she is here. It was a trade, Matteo. A trade. I won't take my life at the cost of yours."
"That's not how it will be," Matteo said sternly. "We are here together, and together we'll leave. We have to trust in that and in each other."
A silvery sword clattered to the ground between them, sending them both leaping back in surprise. Matteo recognized the sword as the weapon Tzigone had stolen from a swordsmith shop the day they'd met and later hidden behind his horse's saddle. Possession of a stolen sword had earned him a night in the city prison.
"Which one of us did that?" he wondered, pointed to the sword.
"Does it matter? The small betrayals add up," Tzigone said, her usually merry voice troubled. "How many times have I stolen your medallion?"
"Four or five," Matteo said dryly.
She shook her head and held up a jordaini emblem, a silver disk enameled with yellow and green, slashed with cobalt blue. "Twenty years on the streets isn't something easily forgotten, Matteo. Sooner or later, I'm going to cause more trouble for you than either of us can handle."
Matteo disagreed-he trusted Tzigone, and he searched his mind for something that might convince her she was worthy of this trust. Even as the thought took shape, a clatter of hooves and a bad-tempered whinny erupted from the mist.
He watched, open-mouthed with astonishment, as a tall black stallion trotted toward them-a horse that some irreverent stable hand had named "Cyric" after an insane and evil god.
"Lord and lady!" Tzigone exclaimed. "All that thing needs is glowing red eyes!"
The horse whickered and blew as Matteo stroked his ebony muzzle. The horse was warm and solid to his touch, not like the illusions the dark fairies had shaped from his stolen thoughts. "You're no nightmare, are you, Cyric my lad? I must admit, however, that when you snort like that I always expect to smell brimstone."
Tzigone eyes narrowed as she regarded the jordain and his favorite mount. "You're actually fond of that beast."
"Indeed I am! Cyric has thrown me, nipped my shoulder, and once when we were traveling he kicked over my lean-to and deliberately passed water in my cooking kettle."
"What's not to love?" she muttered.
"Yet he would run himself to death if I needed speed, and there is no horse alive that I'd rather trust in battle. Cyric is capable of a deeper, more profound loyalty than any creature I know. Any, perhaps, save one."
He slapped the stallion's rump and sent it running off into the mist. "You followed me into Akhlaur's Swamp and fought the laraken, though you had no way of knowing it would not leave you an empty crystal shell. You are here in this place because your friends and your Halruaa were threatened, and you gave yourself in their place. You and Cyric are two of a kind, Tzigone."
"Well, a girl can't hear that too often," she said dryly.
"There is nothing more powerful than friendship-and no friend I would rather have," he said earnestly. "That power has a magic of its own."
Tzigone's eyes brimmed. She dashed away tears with the back of one grubby hand and pointed. Matteo turned. The mist parted to reveal a moss-covered, conical hill. A shimmering oval beckoned them.
Her face froze, her smile shattered. He followed the line of her gaze. A swift-darting swarm approached, a small army of dark fairies apparently bent upon holding their captives in this misty netherworld. There was no way the two friends could reach the portal in time.
Matteo pressed one of his matched daggers into Tzigone's hands and drew his sword. They hardly had time to fall into position, back to back, before the dark fairies fell upon them.
Tiny knives flashed, too fast for the eyes to follow. Matteo felt the stings, shallow and taunting. His sword flashed out again and again, trying in vain to drive them back, and he moved his dagger in swift, complex defensive patterns.
So quick were the fey monsters that they easily darted in and back, working around each of his strokes and lunges, stabbing at him again and again yet always keeping beyond reach of his blade. Pain flooded over Matteo, but pain more like intense sunburn than anything a knife might inflict.
He glanced down. His white garments were flecked with blood from hundreds of pinpricks, and his forearms appeared to be covered with a fine rash.
At this rate, it would take a very long time to die.
He felt Tzigone step away from him, and quickly he moved back into position, determined to keep her back covered.
"Let me go," she insisted, circling around as if to evade his protection.
Matteo easily moved with her, his sword and dagger flashing. "Forget it," he informed her curtly.
She hissed in exasperation and spun, nearly as fast as the fairies, delivering a sharp kick to the back of Matteo's knee.
He only faltered for a moment, but that was enough for Tzigone. She darted away. The Unseelie folk followed her like vengeful shadows.
Before Matteo could regroup, a flash of power lit the misty realm. He threw up one hand to protect his eyes.
When he could see again, he stared in astonishment at the charred bodies of several of the dark fairies. The rest had scattered-or maybe this was the sum total of their attackers.
The dark fairies were smaller than he had expected and so strangely beautiful that he almost regretted their fate. A terrible keening song rose from beyond the mist as the Unseelie folk bewailed their dead.
"They can die here," he marveled.
"So can we," she retorted as she scanned the mist for the next attack. "You didn't by any chance bring iro
n with you?"
"Basel said it can't be done," he said in bleak tones. "Iron weapons won't cross over the veil."
Tzigone's eyes narrowed as she considered this. "Not if you follow the rules, it won't. Call Cyric again."
"I didn't call him the first time."
"Sure you did. You're better at it than I am-that was the most convincing illusion I've seen yet."
"That's impossible! I'm a jordain!"
Even as he spoke, Matteo realized the truth of her words. He could see magic in this place, sense it in a way that powerful wizards and elven magi were said to do. The Weave, the magic Mystra spun and sustained, was as foreign to him as air was to a fish, but perhaps this place knew magic of another sort.
"The Shadow Weave," he said. "It does exist! And I can sense it, even use it!"
He seized the girl's shoulders and turned her to face him. "Shortly before I left the Jordaini College, we received word of a new sort of magic sifting into the Northlands, perhaps even into Halruaa. It is said that the goddess Shar created another source of magic, one that has nothing to do with Mystra. Sages suspect that she experimented in isolated lands, perhaps in other planes of existence. This place of mist and shadows may be one such realm!"
Tzigone looked skeptical. "Fairies have their own gods. Didn't they have anything to say about this? They just stood by and let this Shar set up housekeeping?"
"This is not the Unseelie Court," he explained, "but a corridor between their world and ours. Nothing is real here. I suspect that the dark fairies have no power to hold us-perhaps they are protecting their own borders, as we do ours! Illusion is all-powerful here. It may be that people who stumble in are trapped simply because they believe they can't leave."
She frowned as she tried to sort all this through. "So you're telling me that you're some sort of wizard, after all."
"No! Well, perhaps," he amended. "The jordaini are vessels empty of Mystra's Art. It is possible that this void makes us uniquely suited to the Shadow Weave."
Tzigone shrugged. "You're usually right. What interests me most at the moment is the notion that we could leave any time. Now would be good for me."
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