The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume II

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    “Send a small patrol with tracking dogs that way. Report back here if you find anything. Anything at all. If you find nothing, return here at this hour tomorrow. I must discuss this with the other magicians.” He bowed deeply and stepped back toward the tent. He wished he could fade into the shadows and disappear like Nimbulan could. Like the witchwoman seemed to have done.
    But he couldn’t. He could only retreat like an ordinary man.

Chapter 9
     
    “W hy don’t we wait for torches and assistants?” Quinnault de Tanos remained three steps behind Nimbulan as the magician measured the long corridor with his paces. Pale yellow sunlight pierced the interior gloom in long streaks through the narrow windows.
    “I can see fine,” Nimbulan replied. “Sixty-seven . . . sixty-eight . . . sixty-nine. I want to find the kitchens. Maybe someone left some food. Seventy . . . seventy-one . . . seventy-two paces,” he said.
    They’d found a motheaten blanket, probably threadbare before the priests left, upon a stone bed carved into one of the small cells. Nimbulan had stumbled over a broken sandal in the bathing chamber. Nothing else remained. No furniture, no clothing or linens or decorations. Nothing.
    “How long has this place been empty?” Nimbulan asked as he tried the door handle in the middle of the long passageway. He couldn’t move the latch with brute strength. Briefly he wondered if magic would remove the weight of years and rust on the mechanism.
    “My father explored the place as a teenager. My grandfather mentioned once that he might remember someone living here during his childhood. Caretaker, squatter, or priest, I have no idea.” De Tanos turned in circles as he walked, surveying the masonry and the view from narrow arched windows. Even the storm shutters had been removed.
    “Help me with this door, please.” Nimbulan stood straight and rubbed his shoulder where he had shoved against the wooden panels.
    Together they leaned their combined weight into the door while Nimbulan wiggled the latch with a releasing spell. The handle lifted, but the door remained firmly closed.
    “We can come back later with tools and more men, Nimbulan,” Quinnault said. “The kitchens should be in one of the wings, near an end, not in the center. No sense in burning the entire structure if a cooking fire blazed out of control.”
    “Yes. Logical. But this secured door puzzles me. Every other door is wide open to the wind and the elements. The stone beneath each window is heavily damaged by repeated rain and sunlight. What is so special behind this door that it alone is locked and protected?” He stared at the door one more time, trying to pry its secrets free of the closed panels.
    No images stirred his imagination.
    He paced to the other end of the corridor. Seventy-two steps. The closed room sat in the exact center of the monastery.
    “Did anyone ever offer a reason for the priests leaving this place?” He hastened to catch up with Quinnault who had turned into the eastern wing of the one-story structure. Only the central portion of the U-shaped building rose to a second story. They hadn’t discovered access to basements. On these islands, the water table might be too high to allow digging a deep foundation.
    “I have heard only rumors of the haunting. Was the guardian spirit a ghost?” Quinnault poked his head into another empty room, this one larger than the individual cells of the residential wing—a refectory perhaps?
    “It didn’t act like a ghost. Most spirits of the dead are rather lost and bewildered, seeking guidance to the void between the planes of existence.”
    Keegan would have been a ghost without Nimbulan’s help. Why, Keegan? Why did you make me kill you? The pain was still too new and raw to dismiss. The guardian had relieved his other annoying little guilts, but not that one. He must have done something wrong in bringing up the boy.
    “The kitchen is through here.” De Tanos led the way through a low doorway at the end of the corridor.
    Nimbulan added up his mental count of the length of the corridor. Forty-eight paces. The east and west wings were the same size. The south-facing central wing was almost twice that length as well as double in height.
    Three narrow stairs brought him down into a room that took up half the wing. Two massive fireplaces, one on each outside wall showed sooty stains around and above the hearth. They’d been swept clean of ashes, but no