Ashe knelt on the stone floor of the corridor in the bowels of the palace, as the pain of the attack slowly ebbed. He stared at the rough stone, watching as one after another blood dripped from his split lip into a slowly expanding puddle. Someone near him cried like a small, lost child.

Sliding his left hand forward, he pushed off the ground to stand. His leg muscles practically vibrated with the pain of bone weary fatigue.

…slowly in… 1… 2… 3… 4… 5… the air cut at the tender flesh inside of his long nose as he counted the inhale in his thoughts, and then held the breath for a seven count, before releasing that breath in a controlled release of a nine count. His mind was fuzzy, and his thoughts hazy and distant as he tried to force himself to concentrate on his surroundings.

They had come down stairs to retrieve the king's belt knife. There were problems with it that the Master from the Masons’ Guild had said they needed the king himself to see to.

After breaking their fast, Myrl had insisted on coming down himself. And he and Ash and the guards had come down to the sight of where Myrl had almost been killed. They had spoken with some of the workers, an architect, and several masons.

…and then Myrl… did something… he had his crutches, he bent down to look at… no, he reached for… and … and here his mind shied away from thinking about what it had just experienced.

Ashe let his gaze move about the room. Myrl was gone, and the last place he had seen his ward was now empty of everything it had previously held. Not only was Myrl absent, but the place where he had knelt just prior to the attack was now a clean open circle on the floor. His brow bunched and knotted in perplexity.

There was rapid movement, glancing to his left, Ashe saw that a man was running into the hall from another corridor, and looked panicked. It was one of the serving staff. He was a tall, lanky young man with bad posture and worse skin. Ashe had sent him to the Leech Hall a month ago to get his stoop looked at, but according to Veda, he was more concerned with clearing up his spots than doing any exercises to be able to stand up straight.

“Chaulker!” He called, and the boy turned from the guard who was crying on the floor in a fetal position to run over to Ashe. He offered his hand to help Ashe stand, which mildly impressed the Lord. Ashe had such a “dark” reputation that many of the staff refused to get too close to the man.

“My lord Ashe!” The boy said. “I heard the screaming and the crying, and I came running. But when I got to the door, everyone in here was surrounded by lightning!”

“So, you stayed out of the hall?” He asked the boy.

“Lightning, my lord!” He looked on the verge of panic himself, though he had not apparently been hit by the “lightning.”

“Yes. Lightning. But you stayed in the other corridor, and were safe from it? It didn’t touch you?”

“Oh!” Chaulker realized that Lord Ashe wasn’t upbraiding him for cowardice. “No, it stopped well short of the door. It kept jumping from man to man, and running along the floor like a plague of rats, but it never went further than ‘ol Gurney there!” He pointed at one of the masons sitting up now, who was closest to the door to the southern corridor, but still three body lengths from the entrance.

“And then what happened? Did you see anything else?” Ashe’s breathing was beginning to come back under his control.

“Yes!” The king was screaming, and rolling on the floor, and then everyone near him was shoved away from him like a kid with blocks pushing everything away! Even the tools and the new bricks and cut stone piles around him move away from him. And then he was gone, and it all stopped.”

Ashe swung his head back to where the king had been. Myrl had been looking at the spot on the floor to which his knife had been immovably stuck. And now everything that had been around Myrl was pushed into a wide circle surrounding the empty place.

He walked to the cleared area as steadily as his aching legs would allow, and saw that, indeed, everything had been shoved out radially, even the dirt and detritus.

Myrl was missing. It was possible that whoever had attacked them had taken him.

Ashe reached out and felt for his apprentice and king through the myriad connections they shared and had forged that bound the two men together now.

…the boy is East of here… and he is very confused… and he is incredibly tired… A shock of fear for Myrl went through Ashe as he put together that Myrl had Stepped through Shadows in his clumsy way, and somehow had done it in a way that skirted close to the boy’s own limits.

But he could not sense that he was any worse off now than he had been before the attack had happened. He looked about the chamber, and spotted some deeper shadows in the Southern corner.

Before he could make his way to them, a red light suffused the area around him, and even ate at the available shadows that he had planned to use. He was curious as to what was causing this shift in the lighting.

Someone behind him screamed.

Spinning about, Ashe saw an apparition floating above the prone body of one of the workers. The ephemeral form moved through the air as though a thin rag were drifting on a current in a stream while caught on a submerged root, looking for all of Thach to have been crafted from red candle light that had taken the shape of a shrouded woman. The thing now hovered above its seeming victim.

Ashe moved toward the mirage, and held out a hand to it as he began focusing his mind to trigger a spell of Delving. In an instant, his mind moved out from the crude confines of his body to reach out inquisitively to the floating aberration.

It was wrong.

Had his eyes been what he was using to view this thing before him, they would have been burned from his skull in an overwhelming wash of light and agony. It was like gazing into the sun at noon trying to find details that explained the phenomenon.

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It was RED.

It was LIGHT.

As he gazed longer into the center of the sad, flickering plea for aid, it was …a trapped soul.

Ashe had no idea how this could have come to pass, and could not imagine how such a powerful soul had been trapped in such a manner. He couldn’t see the bindings that held the soul, but through the senses of his Delving, his mind could feel the shape of the bonds that held this trapped being here in this illusory form.

What he could guess was its head, were he to truly anthropomorphize the being floating before him, turned its regard on Ashe.

And it screamed a string of words at him.

“I-MUST-PAY-THE-BARGAIN!”

While Delving, a wizard could not generally speak, as they had left the parts of their body that did the speaking behind. With a concerted effort, Ashe called himself back to his body, ending the Deving, and stood once again where he had been when the spell had started.

It had only been a fraction of a breath, barely a noticeable moment, to those outside of his Delving spell. Any Delving treated time differently to the caster than it did those outside of the spell. A perceptible hour Delving was a heartbeat to those watching.

Ashe stood now, and said, simply, “What?” As the red image broke apart and dissipated on winds none here could feel.

Standing, watching the light fully fade from the broad hallway, Ashe held up his hand to silence the murmur of those who had witnessed its arrival and now puzzled at its departure. Some saw its arrival, thinking that whatever had attacked them all had shown its face, such as it was, to finish them all off.

Panic amongst the injured had been on the rise until it had winked out. Ashe wasn’t ready to assign the attack they had suffered to the apparition, though.

Nothing in its bearing under his Delving had spoken to him of intending any harm, though to his mind’s touch it had reeked of a desperate longing. A deeply seeded need had radiated from the thing more potent than the red light it had been emitting here in the corridor, and on the plain where the Delving took place, his mind could feel its fear-wracked urge to deliver… something.

But it was gone now, and over the sounds of those around him struggling back to their feet, and talking to one another to assess their hurts and injuries, he could also hear the matched footsteps of a squad of guards approaching from the northern end of the corridor.

Behind him a few paces, Chaulker stood transfixed by the fading red light.

“What did you see, Chaulker?” He asked.

“My lord… I’m not at all sure.” The servant looked perplexed. “I saw a bright red light. And then you stepped to it and raised your hand. Then it let out a terrible scream, and we all that heard it yelped back at it. I think it surprised us all, though for my part M’lord, I was terrified something fierce.”

Ashe noticed the boy’s accent had gone from Palace Raised to North Ghlow Trade Streets in the time it had taken Ashe to Delve the thing.

“But you drove it away, m’lord, and now we all need to see to cleaning ourselves up some.” Realizing he may have just made a fecal reference to the second most powerful man in the palace, Chaulker’s eyes went wide in embarrassment.

“When it screamed, did you hear what it said?” Ashe asked, ignoring Chaulker’s discomfort.

‘Uhm, no, my lord. It just let out a screech as you lifted your hand and did your wizardry at it. An’ then it faded away to naught.”

Ashe sighed. He had been hoping the lad could have confirmed for him what he had heard. He didn’t know what it meant. Yet.

But knowing what it had screamed was the first step in figuring out what it may have meant.

The squad of palace guards had arrived, their leader looking about the hallway, his eyes scanning the faces of all present, before focusing upon the Lord Ashe. There was a fleeting look on the man’s face of… disappointment?

The sergeant held up his hand, gesturing his men to stay, and trotted over to Ashe. He bowed precisely to the Lord Ashe.

“My Lord…” he began. “There has been… a person… an emissary lately arrived at the gate wishing an audience with the King.”

The sergeant looked about significantly at that last.

Ashe raised an eyebrow at the man. Just that.

“The emissary is being taken to a room for refreshments and relaxation until a time when his majesty can see her, at the Master Page Lord Baison’s insistence.” His pause gave away to Ashe that the man did not agree with extending any form of hospitality to this emissary.

And then, the reason became clear. “They claim to be from the old troll hag and her cattle thieves who hide up in the Dragon's Teeth Mountains.”

He let that last bit drop from his lips like a piece of rancid gristle.

“Sergeant,” Lord Ashe began, his voice as cold as the stones at the bottom of the harbor. “You mean to tell me that a political representative from Her Grace, Domina Erkinseka Sammish, of the Cloven Peaks’ Clan, Our ally and a personal friend to His Majesty, King Myrl, has arrived here at the palace. You also mean to tell me that this emissary’s needs are being seen to and are now being overseen by Lord Baison, Herald to His Majesty.”

Ashe noticed the man was not from one of the units that had come South from Jibiril Keep with Myrl, but was a Southern Coastal Rhiadian. From his accent, the young sergeant was probably from South Wall, or somewhere near. From his tone, the man was probably raised to look down on the Orcish tribes that inhabited the mountain ranges of the Northern half of the country.

He also noticed that the man was turning red at being not too subtly corrected by Lord Ashe. “Who and where is your Captain, sergeant?”

The question landed like a hammerblow. No one asked for a sergeant’s captain for good reasons. The man stood at attention, suddenly as straight as a spear shaft. The look of fear on his face, and the line of sweat building on his upper lip and forehead spoke volumes. “Captain Abbar, My Lord.” His voice was at least steady.

“Sergeant,” he produced from the inner pocket of his mantle a folded piece of parchment sealed with the king's own seal. “I will need you and the men of your squad to deliver this note to your Captain, and then your entire unit, and your Captain, will report to me at the fourth bell in the West Courtyard. ”

“The entire unit, my lord?” The man wasn’t quaking. But he was close enough that Ashe could sense the minor tremor in the man’s right leg.

“All of you. And Captain Abbar. Dismissed.”

“My Lord!” The young sergeant did a smart turn on his heels and marched back to his squad, signaling them all to follow. They fell in behind the young man, and marched with speed and precision from the corridor, back up the northern hallway.

Turning back to the servant, Chaulker, “Please go over there and help the master mason to his feet, and then run to the Leech Hall, and bring back a few healers to look at all of these people, please.”

Ashe then strode past the young servant, heading toward the shadows in the southern corner by the doors to the hallways beyond. When he reached the shadows, Ashe pulled himself through the shadows there, and concentrated on the feel of Myrl.

He had been with the young man for so many years at this point that stepping through Shadows to Myrl counted as a location to the gray skinned wizard. It didn’t always work, as Myrl was current;y not near any large, deep shadows that Ashe could use. The closest shadow to his wayward ward was in a stand of birch and korwood trees growing along the Royal Road leading out from the Eastern Gate of the city. Ashe estimated from the duration in the shadow, and by how cold he was as he exited, that he was now at least a half of a mile East of the city. In the distance, he could see one of the busier shipyards.