The Dragon Nimbus Novels: Volume III: Volume III

brushing dust from it as best she could. “How long have you known who I am?”
    “Since the beginning. Who else would haunt the palace like the most beautiful ghost this world ever saw?”
    “Why did I know you’d say something lovely like that?” She smiled up at him, welcoming his open admiration of her.

    Marcus waited until the faint sounds of Robb settling back into his bed filtered through the wall separating their rooms. Barefoot, he crept across to the doorway and waited again. Vareena had quieted, too. The chill of the ages seeped from the stones into his feet. But he dared not put on his boots. He needed quiet and privacy. Not even the ghost must hear him.
    He was convinced the ghost had given or augmented Vareena’s nightmare. He had to be stopped. And Marcus had to be the one to stop him.
    He’d oiled the leather hinges of his door this afternoon with a bit of fat from his breakfast bacon. The door opened silently. He closed it again behind him, leaving it just slightly ajar so that even the click of the latch would not alert another to his movements.
    A tiny bit of light showed around the edges of Robb’s door, as it did most nights. For some reason the absolute darkness within the monastery bothered him. He set a ball of witchlight in his window each night and let it fade as he fell asleep.
    Vareena’s room was dark, but a little light glowed from the refectory.
    Marcus welcomed the dark tonight. He needed stealth.
    Thirty paces down the colonnade brought him to the doorway of the corner master’s suite. No one else seemed to have noticed that this room remained unused by those seeking sanctuary here. The previous prisoners should have sought the relative luxury of the larger room with its own privy. Even he and Robb had instinctively chosen rooms at the end of the wing of the building rather than bunk in here.
    Why?
    In asking the question, he knew the room must contain answers to the entrapment puzzle. But the answers were hidden and not easily ferreted out.
    The door opened easily and silently at his touch. He’d greased these hinges as well as his own. Once inside, with the door closed, he brought a ball of cold light to his palm and held it aloft.
    Nothing seemed changed, or out of place. An ordinary room reserved for the most senior magician who would administer the place from the office portion of the room. The bed niche behind the half wall would allow him to rest in relative privacy. From here he had easy access to the tower observation platform where he would monitor the movements of the stars and moon in the endless wheel of time.
    Marcus had seen many towers and many observation platforms in his career. Answers might lie in the stars, but those patterns were subject to interpretation. What he needed was communion with the ancient spirits who had lived here long ago, when the first ghosts came here to die.
    Inanimate objects could absorb strong emotions. Stone walls might reveal things that people forgot.
    He placed the ball of witchlight in a niche beside the tower stairs. It nestled in there as if born to the place. The builders must have placed the small opening there as a night light for weary magicians moving up and down the staircase when they watched the stars for omens and portents of the future as well as answers to the present.
    Breathing deeply, Marcus stared at the wall that adjoined the library, seeking a vulnerable place; some stone that might have been struck in anger or frustration, a place where a weary man had leaned for a moment of rest.
    A trance settled on his shoulders, and the light in the room seemed to magnify. The tiny chinks and crevices blazed forth. The stones and the mortar took on a luminescence. He could see every fleck of minerals on the surface.
    There! The stone a little below shoulder height, five blocks away from the doorway, seemed to have a handprint outlined in tiny glowing dots of white marble within the granite. Marcus placed his own left hand over the handprint. His longer and narrower fingers spread beyond the print, but his palm seemed an almost perfect match.
    Already, he got a sense of the man, shorter than himself, probably stouter. And there, a darker splotch, about his nose level, where he had rested his head. He mimicked the posture.
    Beneath his ear, the stones seemed to pulse. He let his trance fall deeper, penetrate the wall taking him . . .

    Betrayed! The one who has claimed to be my friend our entire lives has betrayed me.