Felitïa hadn’t thought about light. She should have planned this better. She really should turn around, rejoin the others, and plan this better.

Then again, as long as there was no light, it would be easier to remain unseen. And this had to be done now. She was sure of it.

She would have to feel her way forward, and that was yet another thing that would be more awkward with her fingers in their current state. She prodded with her elbow again to find the wall, and prodded with her feet to find the edge of each step. It was slow going, but eventually she reached the bottom.

It was still pitch black in the burial chamber of the ancient Ninifin ruler. How would she find the next secret door?

Felitïa.

The presence felt louder now. Closer.

Felitïa.

Perhaps she could follow it like a sound—the way she perceived it to sound anyway. She dismissed the Room first; it’s jumbled locations would be no help in this case. She had to do this blind.

Felitïa.

She stepped forward into the dark.

Felitïa.

Another step. And another. Each one slow and deliberate. She didn’t want to walk into a wall.

After several minutes, her foot hit something. A wall? She probed a bit. No. A step. The dais in the room’s centre? She stepped onto it, moved forward until her knee brushed against the sarcophagus.

Felitïa.

Was it in the sarcophagus? No, it was still too far away.

A sliver of flickering light appeared ahead of her along with a grinding noise. In the silent dark, the light was blinding and the sound deafening. The light expanded as the door where Fra-Atl had died ground open.

Felitïa cast her spell. The energy flowed through her in an unfamiliar way. It sent tingling through her stomach and thighs, then her knees and lower legs. Oddly, pain shot through her arms and hands, exacerbating the pain in her fingers. Her body protesting the unusual energy distribution, perhaps? But the spell worked.

She hoped.

It wasn’t as stable as she might have liked, and its demand on her energy reserves was much greater than she had experienced from this spell in a long time.

A Volg holding a torch stood in the now-open doorway. He stepped into the room, and the light spread out, providing dim illumination to most of the chamber. Two more Volgs with drawn swords followed him. They moved to the side and another entered. This one wore black robes and a heavy gold medallion in the shape of a goat’s skull.

The one who had been with Castroff at Lake Belone. The one Felitïa had spotted the last time she’d been in this chamber. Nibdenoff.

In his hands he held a tall wooden staff that looked short against his great height. It was hard to make out in the dim light, but the top of the staff was carved in a design. Felitïa could make out wings and hollow eye sockets. The missing Staff of Sestin?

FELITÏA!

The staff was calling to her.

The Volg with the torch said something in the Volg language, and Nibdenoff replied. The Volg with the torch and the two armed Volgs spread out and moved farther into the room. All three were gazing from side to side and up and down as they moved. Did they suspect she was here?

FELITÏA!

Nibdenoff peered at the staff.

FELITÏA!

He sneered.

The staff was giving her presence away.

The torch-bearing Volg reached the edge of the dais and placed the torch in a holder there. He then drew his sword, still looking about.

Felitïa backed off the dais. Each step intensified the pain in her arms. Why the hell was that happening? When she next had a moment to practice, she would have to study the effects of this casting method and find a way to fix them.

If she didn’t die first.

The added pain was making maintaining the spell ever harder.

The other two Volgs moved past the dais and circled around. One of them looked up the stairs and called something back. Perhaps an all clear since he moved away from the stairs again?

Nibdenoff scowled and moved towards the dais. Behind him, another smaller figure came into view. The figure appeared human and followed the Volg across the chamber. But the figure’s head was too round, too perfectly spherical for a human head. And it glittered in the torch light.

It wasn’t a head at all, but a crystal ball, like the one Nibedenoff had carried at Lake Belone. But sitting atop a walking, headless body.

Dear gods. It was Fra-Atl.

The Volg stepped onto the dais and laid the staff on top of the sarcophagus. Fra-Atl stood beside him, and he placed his hand on the crystal ball. It began to glow much more brightly than the torchlight. Yellow energy crackled and danced across its surface.

This was impossible. Fra-Atl was dead.

Necromancy?

But necromancy was a lost discipline—lost to humans and Isyar, at any rate. Could the Volgs have retained knowledge of magic even the Isyar no longer retained?

Nibdenoff placed his other hand on the staff and crackling yellow energy flowed from the crystal ball over his body and to the staff.

The staff screamed.

Felitïa stumbled and struggled to hold on to the spell. Was it really screaming? No, not out loud. In her head. It was deafening, and threatened to tear away her concentration. She scrambled to move the Room’s walls into a tight circle around the staff’s presence, blocking it out. That was better, though she could still hear it faintly. And it was getting louder again.

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She had to do something.

Only one thing came to mind. She would lose the hiding spell, but she was going to lose that anyway once her concentration broke. This way, she might accomplish something before dying.

The crackling energy was lighting the entire chamber like the sun now. The energy continued to flow from it, across the robed Volg, and into the staff. And the staff continued to scream louder in her head. The walls she’d put around its presence were beginning to crack.

Felitïa took a deep breath, tossed aside the spell, and ran for the dais and the staff. As she ran, she opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.

The three armed Volgs turned in her direction and Nibdenoff looked up. His hand clenched around the staff and he sneered.

At the last moment, Felitïa turned to the side and ran straight into Fra-Atl, knocking the old woman’s body over. The crystal ball crashed to the floor. It shattered and its light and energy vanished.

The staff stopped screaming.

Felitïa, however, only stopped screaming long enough to take a breath. She had no idea if she was loud enough for Zandrue and the others to hear, but she could hope.

“Will-Breaker,” Nibdenoff said.

Felitïa scrambled to her feet, accidentally putting pressure again on her broken fingers, but she was starting to get used to the pain now. At the very least, it was a reminder that she wasn’t dead yet.

One of the other Volgs leapt at her. Felitïa stopped screaming and put him to sleep. He crashed into the side of the dais. It woke him back up, but it slowed him down. As the second came at her, she did the same to him. He fell forward smashing his snout on the floor. The third was still too far away.

More sounds came from behind as more Volgs entered the room. Nibdenoff reached for the staff.

“I have the Child of the Volgs,” Felitïa said, her voice hoarse and rough.

Nibdenoff hesitated.

“I took him back from Fra-Ichtaca.”

“Then you will die,” the Volg said.

“Only I know where he is.”

The Volg shrugged. “Then we will find him again. You will still die.”

Metal clanging against stone sounded from the stairs. Nibdenoff turned to look in that direction just as Rudiger ran into the room, Nin-Akna close behind.

Felitïa ran forward and reached for the staff. She couldn’t grab hold of it, but she could knock if off the sarcophagus, out of the Volg’s reach. Nibdenoff turned on her, so she put him to sleep.

Except it didn’t work.

He grabbed her by the shoulder and something else grabbed her foot—the Volg that had collided with the side of the dais. An arrow then tore through that one’s neck and he released her foot.

Nibdenoff still had her shoulder—luckily, not the injured one, but his grip was painful enough anyway. He pulled her towards him, grabbed her other shoulder with his other hand. This time, the pain was excruciating. He was strong enough to rip her apart like a doll—she had no doubt of that—and she couldn’t stop him the way she’d stopped Agranim.

There was a dull thud and the Volg let go of her with a hiss. Felitïa kicked him, then rushed around to the other side of the sarcophagus where the staff lay. There was an arrow sticking out of Nibdenoff’s back between his wings. Across the room, by the stairs, Zandrue was firing arrows.

Rudiger and Nin-Akna were fighting back-to-back. A couple Volgs lay on the ground at their feet, but they were being surrounded by more.

“Carcraime!” Nibdenoff said as Zandrue fired another arrow at him. It thudded into his chest, but he still didn’t fall.

Felitïa bent over and fumbled for the staff. She tried to get a thumb under it, hook onto it that way. If she could somehow get it between her elbow or under her armpit, maybe she could hold onto it long enough to get it out of here.

“Felitïa! Look out!” a voice called—Corvinian’s.

Felitïa rolled aside, just as a Volg flew down at her. She put him to sleep and he crashed into the sarcophagus.

Her fingers and arms burned. Her feet and legs ached. She couldn’t keep this up for much longer.

But the room was bathed in light again—more than could be provided by the feeble torch. It was a blue light, and it gave everything in the room a dark, shadow-like quality. Felitïa peered around the sarcophagus to see Corvinian standing beside Zandrue. The boy was bathed in the familiar blue energy.

The energy shot out in streams across the room. It knocked aside the Volgs attacking Rudiger and Nin-Akna. It circled around the two humans and bent upwards to knock aside Volgs flying in the air. Another stream shot at the robed Volg who rushed around the sarcophagus and reached for the staff. Felitïa kicked at him, tried to trip him or knock him aside, but failed. With a single swipe of his arm, he smashed her into the side of the sarcophagus, knocking the breath from her.

The Volg wrapped his hands around the staff just as the blue energy hit him. It sent him sliding across the floor, but he kept his grip on the staff which began to glow with the yellow energy.

Felitïa struggled to stand, groaned with the pain that was her whole body.

All around the room, the blue energy was driving the Volgs back to the door they had come from—all except Nibdenoff. Both he and the staff were surrounded by the yellow energy now, and whenever it and the blue energy encountered each other, they both winked out.

Just like at Lake Belone.

“Felitïa! Come on!” Zandrue yelled.

Nibdenoff was standing back up. The blue energy from Corvinian intensified its assault. Several streams shot at the Volg, but the blue continued to vanish as soon as it hit the yellow.

“We have to get the staff!” Felitïa cried back.

“It’s too dangerous! We have to go now!”

Nin-Akna ran up to Felitïa and took her arm. “We go. That’s an order.”

Felitïa took another look at Nibdenoff, who was now striding towards Corvinian. She nodded. They had to get Corvinian out of here. She and Nin-Akna ran towards the stairs. They passed Rudiger, who followed after them.

At the stairs, Zandrue was already ushering Corvinian through the door. Meleng was waiting on the other side. “Go on, quickly,” he urged.

Corvinian ran up the stairs, followed by Zandrue, Nin-Akna, and Felitïa. Part way up, Felitïa paused and glanced back. She could only make out shadows in the fading light of Corvinian’s blue energy farther above, but the door was closed now, and Meleng appeared to be tracing designs onto it.

“Are you sure of this?” Rudiger, standing beside him, asked.

“Sort of.” Meleng finished what he was doing and both he and Rudiger darted up the stairs.

“Keep going!” Rudiger yelled at Felitïa.

She turned and continued running up the stairs.

When she reached the next level, Zandrue, Nin-Akna, and Corvinian were waiting in the hall. Corvinian’s blue energy had vanished, but there was still light from the torches they had procured earlier.

Rudiger and Meleng reached the hall. They paused there and Rudiger raised his hand for silence.

A moment later, Rudiger said, “I don’t hear anyone coming. Looks like your trick worked Meleng.”

There was a loud bang from below, the sound of crashing stone.

“Or maybe not,” Zandrue said.

“Well, it slowed them down a little,” Meleng said with a frown.

“Up the stairs!” Zandrue said.

They hurried up staircase after staircase, making their way to the top and the exit. The sounds of pursuit remained constant behind them. When they finally reached the top, they were all gasping for air, even Rudiger and Nin-Akna, who were the fittest amongst them. Poor Meleng was coated in dripping sweat and looked ready to fall over.

“Fra-Ichtaca’s gone!” Nin-Akna screeched. “I knew we should have killed her.”

“No time to worry about that now,” Zandrue said. “We need to keep going. The Volgs are still coming and very soon, they’re going to have a lot more space available to them.” She hurried out of the Temple. The others followed.