*
Phin was more surprised than anyone, for he had hardly committed the plaza to memory when he had passed through it four days ago with Claudja and the unlamented legionnaires. He knew he would have a better chance of teleporting into the small house where he had spent the first night in the city, but that place was still far from the gate. Even worse, given the building’s size and the fact that he would be teleporting a full nine people, Phin was sure that he would have put someone into a wall, with results he did not want to consider.
So the party gambled, and he tried for the plaza. He hit it spot on, and though the others had stared at him in amazement for a moment before everyone was up and running, Phin knew the credit was not really due himself. He had wrapped his hand around the golden jewel atop the wand within his right sleeve as he read the spell, and he had felt the surge of the Witch King’s power when the world around him began to fade.
The party emerged from the gatehouse and their feet rang loudly as they raced across the iron drawbridge. Then they were off it and out of the mist at a step, people shouting in surprise as after four days in a gray-and-black world they emerged into a different one with impossibly green grass, and a brilliant blue sky high above them.
They ran on a hundred yards or so before warning horns started to blow ahead of them in the Shugak towers fronting Camp Town, and Deskata shouted for everyone to halt.
“Do it again, Phoarty!” he yelled, and everyone who had drawn weapons snapped them back into sheaths and scabbards. Phin dropped to a cross-legged seat on the ground and opened the book on his lap. He opened to where a finger marked a page that was now blank, and hurriedly flipped ahead to the next teleport spell. The others joined hands in a circle around him, except for Claudja who knelt behind Phin, one hand linked to Tilda’s and the other sliding into the collar of Phin’s robes to rest on his bare shoulder.
Phin found the next teleport spell and started to read aloud, the rhythmic words of old Tullish flaring blue on the page as he spoke them, moving one finger along the lines. With his other hand, still within his right sleeve, he again clasped the golden gem atop the wand of the long dead Witch King, and felt the warm surge of its power.
The words on the page faded even as Phin read them, and he listened only to the sound of his own voice, not to the horns nor the sharp croaking noises, nor to the people telling him to hurry. Phin’s mind fell away from itself and he thought of long months of longer nights and early mornings, boredom and uselessness. The grass and the sky disappeared and there was another stomach-churning jolt, though actually not as bad as the first one. Phin knew the place he was going to this time, only too well.
In an instant Phin was sitting on hard stone in an ugly barren courtyard with mismatched walls, next to a dirt-filled fountain out of which sprouted weeds and the hacked stump of a dead tree. Phin’s friends were all around him, if he could call them that, and he thought that now he probably could as that had been some serious magic he had just performed, without killing any of them.
Two horses whinnied and Zeb yelled, “Whoa!” A wagon with a very startled-looking driver stopped just short of the party, the man on the board staring at them with his mouth hanging open.
“Souterm?” Claudja asked, her hand still on Phin’s shoulder, holding on tight.
“Welcome to the Empire, your Grace.” Phin said, and then Claudja was hugging him, weeping and laughing at the same time. Everyone else started doing the same.
Chapter Forty-Two
The Sable City Page 101
