The Presence

Zook did not like places where nothing moved.

The Great Swamp had taught him that silence could mean many things. A predator nearby. Weather coming. A place animals had learned to avoid. Around Orozon's temple, the absence of birds and insects had become a warning long before they understood what waited inside.

Oron felt different.

There was life here. Zook could see it in the vines crawling over stone, in the insects clinging beneath broad leaves, in the small tracks pressed into the wet soil between ruined buildings. The island itself was alive.

The city was not.

He stood beside the carcass of the creature that had erupted from beneath the street and listened while the others recovered from the fight. The beast's armored body lay across cracked paving stones, its blood disappearing into weeds that had forced their way through the road.

Nothing came to investigate.

No scavengers called from the trees. No frightened animals fled the noise they had made.

Even the mist seemed unwilling to move.

Zook wiped his blade clean and pushed damp red hair away from his eyes.

Jandar was standing near the crevice the beast had used to reach them, looking down into the dark.

“There could be another one,” Zook said.

Jandar backed away immediately.

“I was specifically told they do not come in pairs.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don't remember.”

“Then that sounds reliable.”

Jandar gave him a suspicious look.

Deacon was checking the limbs of the dead creature as though considering whether any part of it might make useful armor. Xil had finished tending the worst of their injuries, though the strain showed around his eyes. Vegon hovered briefly above the crevice using the enchanted boots recovered from Orozon's temple, peering into several tunnels exposed in the broken earth.

Mills stayed well back.

He had developed good instincts.

Vegon descended.

“It burrowed in from the side. There are multiple tunnels.”

Jandar took another step away from the opening.

“Excellent. I was worried the island might become welcoming.”

Zook crouched beside one of the tracks left in the soft earth. The creature had been moving beneath them before it attacked. He could follow disturbed soil for only a short distance before stone and roots hid the trail.

It had known exactly where they were.

Or perhaps anything moving through Oron eventually drew attention.

Neither possibility improved his mood.

“What now?” Xil asked.

Zook looked north.

The city stretched into the mist. Broken roofs and leaning walls appeared and vanished as the fog shifted. An old road continued between them, broad enough that wagons might once have passed in both directions.

They had come to understand what happened here.

So far they had learned only that the things living in the ruins were unfriendly.

“Keep looking,” Zook said.

Deacon nodded.

That settled it.

They left the dead beast behind.

The next warning came from the trees.

Zook heard the branches moving long before he saw what was breaking them. At first he thought the sound belonged to another of the burrowing beasts, something large tunneling beneath the roots. Then a tree shook above the mist, and its crown leaned sideways without a breath of wind.

He lifted his hand. The others stopped.

“What?” Deacon asked.

Zook listened. The steps were separated by long, heavy intervals. Each one ended in a dull impact that seemed to come through his boots rather than his ears.

“Something big.”

Jandar took one look at the movement beyond the houses and stepped toward the open street.

“How big?”

A shape pushed through the trees on the far side of a ruined estate. Its head rose above a broken wall, enormous and blunt, its jaws opening beneath a ridge of scarred scales. The hind legs were thicker than the stone pillars of the nearest gateway. Its tail swept branches aside as it turned.

Zook had seen drawings of creatures like it in old accounts of lands beyond the settled kingdoms. None of the illustrations had prepared him for the sound it made.

“Big enough,” he said.

Mills retreated behind the nearest house. Deacon moved to find a clear shot. Xil stayed farther back, his gaze fixed on the great jaws. Vegon backed toward the shelter of a wall, measuring distance with the expression he wore whenever he wished an opponent would remain still long enough to become a problem of geometry.

Jandar, naturally, did the opposite.

The swashbuckler slipped forward along the edge of the ruined estate, using the broken masonry to approach while the monster's head was turned. For a remarkable moment it did not notice him.

Then the first attack struck.

The tyrant lizard jerked toward the sudden pain. Jandar was already moving, his rapier bright in his hand. From the road, Zook sent arrows into the creature's scaled flank. The missiles struck hard enough to draw blood, but the thing barely slowed. Deacon's crossbow answered from another angle.

The animal turned through the street, its immense body making the old buildings seem like children's toys. A fallen wall shattered beneath one foot. Its tail raked the empty air behind it.

Vegon raised an unfamiliar wand and released its stored magic.

Grass erupted from the cracks in the road.

Not creeping grass. Not a few green blades pushing through stone. A sudden thick growth spread around the monster's feet, rising knee-high on the humans in a place that had been bare moments before.

Jandar glanced at the greenery, then at the enormous carnivore standing in it.

“Perhaps if we convince it to graze?”

Vegon lowered the wand with visible disappointment.

“I cannot select the result.”

“An unfortunate feature.”

Xil advanced enough to bring his magic to bear, while Zook continued to loose arrows from the far side of the road. The creature bellowed and surged toward them, its strides eating up the distance so quickly that the space they had thought safe vanished.

Its jaws closed around Xil.

Zook saw the cleric disappear between teeth longer than daggers. Blood darkened the drow's armor. The monster lifted its head, shook him with awful force and flung him aside.

“Xil!”

Xil hit the ground hard. For a moment he did not move.

Jandar came in at the beast's side. He could not reach its throat, but he could reach the softer scales behind its leg. He drove his rapier in and withdrew before the creature could bring its weight down upon him.

“Over here!” he shouted.

The monster's head swung toward him.

That was what Jandar wanted. Its attention on his blade and his movement instead of the fallen cleric.

A terrible tail stroke whipped across the space he had just occupied. Jandar twisted away, boots skidding on broken stone, and came back in as soon as the opening appeared. His next thrust struck home.

Zook abandoned his bow and charged close enough to use his swords. The beast's bulk did not make it invulnerable. Beneath the scales there was muscle to cut, and its movements had grown slower under the injuries the company had inflicted. Zook struck low, withdrew and struck again, careful not to be caught beneath one of those immense feet.

Deacon shifted position to keep a clear line past Jandar and Zook. He had changed to his better bolts. Each shot required a deliberate breath and a clear choice of where to put it. The lizard's side was bristling with arrows and quarrels now, and its fury had begun to outweigh its strength.

Vegon tried another spell, reaching to compress the creature's great mass with an arcane working. The power gathered, shuddered against the tainted Weave and failed to change the animal at all.

He swore and changed tactics.

Pale darts of force leapt from his hand and hammered into the monster's body. Those struck true. The huge head twisted, jaws still wet with Xil's blood, and for an instant the creature seemed uncertain which of its attackers to kill first.

Mills emerged far enough from behind the house to call encouragement toward Zook. He was pale, his lute held against his chest as if he had forgotten what to do with it, but he did not run.

Jandar struck once more, then slipped away from the lashing tail. Zook pressed from below. Deacon fired again. The beast staggered, tried to turn, and found that its failing legs could no longer obey.

It fell across the ruined road with a force that shook dust from the remaining walls.

For several breaths nobody moved.

Then Jandar stepped back and looked at the mountain of scales stretched before them.

“Well,” he said. “We have established that it can be killed.”

Deacon had already turned toward Xil.

The cleric lay motionless where the creature had thrown him. Blood had soaked through the rents in his armor. A ragged bite marked his side and shoulder, and his breathing was so shallow that Zook could not see it until he knelt close.

“Xil?”

No answer.

The brief satisfaction of bringing down the beast vanished. Someone knelt beside the drow and called healing into the torn flesh. The prayer took hold, and Xil drew a harsh breath. His eyes opened to the gray light of Oron.

For a while he said nothing.

Jandar crouched beside him. “We won, if that improves your opinion of the day.”

Xil looked at the dead creature beyond them, then at the blood on his own armor.

“It does not.”

“Reasonable.”

They gave him time to recover before moving on. Zook inspected the destruction at the edge of the trees. Branches lay snapped across the ground, and the animal's passage had cut a wide, unmistakable trail through the undergrowth. He found no nest and no second set of prints large enough to belong to another of its kind.

Mills had already begun trying to give the event a suitably heroic title.

“Do not,” Jandar told him.

“I haven't said anything.”

“You've got the expression.”

Mills smiled down at his lute. “I thought it might be a good song.”

“A song about six people nearly becoming breakfast?”

“And one of us nearly was,” Deacon said, looking toward Xil.

Jandar looked at the enormous carcass. “Then perhaps make it a short song.”

They took the northern road again, leaving the fallen tyrant lizard behind. A ruined windmill emerged through the fog farther west. The city still held secrets, and nothing about this encounter had explained what had happened to its people.

But as Zook moved ahead, he found himself looking more carefully at the trees above the broken houses.

Oron had already surprised them once with the size of what lived there.

He did not intend to be surprised that way again.

The farther they moved from the harbor, the more Oron revealed itself in fragments. Stone foundations showed through roots. Trees grew inside homes that had once been large enough to belong to merchants or officials. Doorways opened into rooms filled with ferns. In one house, a staircase climbed six feet before ending in empty air where the upper floor had collapsed decades earlier.

Zook tried to read the city the way he would have read a forest.

It resisted him.

There were no signs of a battle large enough to explain the abandonment. No burned district, except the building they would later contribute themselves. No barricades. No mass graves. No obvious point where destruction spread outward.

Time had done most of the damage.

That was worse.

People had simply stopped repairing things.

Stopped clearing roads.

Stopped cutting back vegetation.

Stopped living here.

He paused beside a doorway where a vine as thick as his wrist had wrapped itself around the remains of a wooden lintel.

“Fifty years,” Vegon said behind him.

Zook glanced back.

The high elf was studying the same building.

“What?”

“Perhaps sixty. Some structures could have failed earlier, but the growth suggests the city has been abandoned for decades rather than centuries.”

“You can tell that from a wall?”

Vegon looked at him.

“Among other things.”

Zook nodded toward the tree growing through the roof.

“I can tell from that.”

Vegon frowned.

“That too.”

They continued.

A faint scraping sound came from ahead.

Zook stopped.

So did Deacon.

The others required another step before noticing.

Jandar looked back.

“What?”

Zook raised one hand.

There.

Again.

A quick, dry skitter somewhere between the buildings to their right.

Not large.

More than one.

Then silence.

Zook moved to the edge of the road and crouched behind a collapsed section of wall. Grass grew nearly to his shoulders here, enough to hide something his size completely and something larger if it stayed low.

He studied the ground.

Tracks overlapped in the damp soil.

Small feet.

Almost human.

Almost.

“How many?” Deacon asked quietly.

“I don't know.”

Vegon called his familiar down from where it had been circling among the ruins.

The little creature disappeared through a broken window.

Vegon closed his eyes.

Zook watched his face instead of the building.

For a few moments nothing changed.

Then Vegon's brow tightened.

“There are things between the houses.”

“Things?” Jandar asked.

Vegon opened his eyes.

“I did not have time to conduct a taxonomy.”

“That sounded painful.”

“They are hiding.”

Zook looked at the nearest structure.

The wall had partially collapsed, opening the interior to the street. Something moved behind the hanging vines.

A glimpse of gray flesh.

Then nothing.

“They know we're here,” he said.

Deacon lifted his crossbow.

“Then let them come.”

They did not.

Several minutes passed.

The things remained hidden.

Jandar looked from the buildings to Vegon.

“We could go around.”

Zook shook his head.

“They'll follow.”

“You know that?”

“No.”

“Excellent.”

Xil stared at the nearest ruined house.

“What if we force them out?”

Jandar's expression brightened.

That alone should have warned everyone.

“With what?”

Xil raised one hand.

Pale flame gathered above his palm.

Vegon looked toward the wet, vine-covered wall.

“That may take some time.”

“You have a better idea?”

Vegon considered.

Then fire gathered in his own hand.

Zook sighed.

Mills took three steps backward.

“I assume this is normal.”

“No,” Zook said.

Jandar looked offended.

“It is becoming normal.”

The first flame caught badly.

The ruins were soaked with mist, and much of the exposed timber had softened beneath years of rain. Xil's divine fire blackened a section of old wall and set a small tongue of orange flame along the edge of rotted thatch.

Vegon fed it.

The fire grew.

Slowly at first.

Then something inside the building hissed.

Zook saw movement.

“Ready.”

Deacon raised his crossbow.

Jandar drew the moon-touched rapier.

The first creature burst through the grass.

It was smaller than Zook had expected and far more disturbing.

Its proportions were almost human, though its limbs seemed too long for the withered body they supported. Gray skin stretched over bones beneath scraps of decayed clothing. Its mouth opened around dark teeth.

It moved too quickly to be dead.

It looked too dead to be alive.

The creature rushed Xil.

Jandar intercepted it.

His rapier cut across its chest and nearly spun it around, but the thing stayed upright.

Another came through the broken building behind it.

Then three more.

“So much for hiding,” Jandar said.

Zook drew his sword.

The fight spread through the street.

The creatures were not strong individually. Their danger came from speed and numbers, darting from ruined houses and through tall grass where the party could not always see them coming.

One slashed Jandar across the arm.

The wound barely seemed worth noticing until Jandar staggered.

Zook smelled something bitter.

“Poison.”

“I had noticed.”

Jandar stepped away, favoring the arm for several seconds before forcing himself back into the fight.

Deacon's crossbow sounded behind them.

A bolt struck one of the creatures through the chest and carried it backward into a wall.

Zook moved toward another before it could reach Vegon.

It was almost his height.

That felt strangely insulting.

The creature clawed at his face. Zook ducked, cut across its middle and followed the motion with a second strike before it recovered. The gray thing folded around the blade.

He pulled free and turned.

Vegon's fire had finally taken hold.

Flames climbed the front of the ruined house and spread into the remains of the roof. The mist thickened with smoke. Shapes that had been waiting inside began rushing into the street.

That had been the point.

Zook still thought there might have been a quieter way.

A creature came toward him.

He met it.

Another moved behind Jandar.

Deacon shot it.

Xil called divine power into the street, though the magic faltered as it formed. The taint distorted the light around him, turning clean radiance into something briefly edged with shadow.

Xil forced the spell through anyway.

The creature nearest him recoiled.

Vegon's magic fared little better. A sphere of fire appeared between two buildings, rolling through the alley and driving more of the gray creatures into the open, but Zook saw the wizard flinch as the spell formed.

Every use of magic carried a price now.

They kept using it.

There was no choice.

One of the creatures came at Zook from his blind side.

Jandar appeared between them.

The rapier flashed.

The creature dropped.

“You're welcome.”

Zook stabbed the one coming behind Jandar.

“So are you.”

Jandar glanced back.

“That was mine.”

“It isn't moving.”

“That was not the point.”

The fight did not last long after that.

Once the creatures lost the protection of the ruins, Deacon's crossbow cut them down faster than they could close. Zook and Jandar worked the street together while Xil guarded Vegon whenever the wizard reached for stronger magic.

Soon the only movement came from the burning house.

Smoke rose into the mist and disappeared.

Zook stood breathing hard among the bodies.

He nudged one with his boot.

Its skin looked ancient.

Not rotten exactly.

Desiccated.

“What are they?” Mills asked from the safety of a doorway.

Xil crouched beside one.

“I don't know.”

Jandar looked down at the wound on his arm.

“Poisonous.”

“That narrows it considerably,” Vegon said.

Jandar gave him a look.

Zook moved away from the bodies.

He did not need a name for them yet.

What mattered was that they had been waiting.

The city had seemed empty because the things inside it knew how to stay out of sight.

That changed how he saw every doorway.

They traveled more carefully after that.

The road climbed gradually away from the harbor. Another deep crevice cut through one section of the city, forcing them around a cluster of collapsed buildings.

The mist thickened as afternoon gave way toward evening.

Vegon used his boots to rise above the rooftops and search for some sign of where the destruction might have begun.

He came down with nothing.

“No center,” he said. “No obvious blast. No burned district. Nothing that suggests a single catastrophe.”

“So everyone simply left,” Mills said.

“Or died,” Deacon replied.

Mills looked at the buildings.

“That was less comforting.”

Deacon did not apologize.

Zook understood what he meant.

Cities did not die for no reason.

People fled war. Disease. Hunger. Monsters. Fire.

Something had emptied Oron.

Whatever it was had left enough behind that fifty years later the streets still belonged to things that should not have been there.

They found the tower near dusk.

It stood on higher ground northeast of the old road, rising above the surrounding ruins despite having lost part of its upper level. Vines wrapped the stone. Several narrow windows stared blackly through the mist.

Zook stopped below it.

The tower felt different.

He could not explain why.

Nothing about the tracks warned him. Nothing moved in the brush. The tower smelled of wet stone and vegetation like everything else around them.

Still, something tightened between his shoulders.

Jandar had already started up the slope.

“Wait.”

Jandar looked back.

“What?”

Zook listened.

Nothing.

That was all.

“I don't know.”

Jandar smiled.

“Excellent reason.”

He turned back toward the tower.

Then stopped.

Zook saw the change before anyone else did.

Jandar's posture loosened.

The hand holding his rapier dropped slightly.

His expression became almost peaceful.

That frightened Zook more than if he had shouted.

“Jandar?”

The human looked back.

His dark hair was damp against his forehead, and there was something unfocused in his eyes.

“We're fine.”

Deacon lifted the crossbow a fraction.

“No one said we weren't.”

Jandar smiled.

“Exactly.”

Zook stared at him.

Jandar was many things.

Calm for no reason was not one of them.

Xil stepped closer.

“What do you feel?”

Jandar looked toward the tower.

“There is someone here.”

“Where?”

Jandar frowned, as though the question itself were confusing.

“A friend.”

Zook drew his sword.

Jandar noticed.

“You don't need that.”

“Probably not.”

The lie came easily.

Zook kept the blade low.

“Who's your friend?”

Jandar's smile widened slightly.

“I don't know.”

Deacon's crossbow came all the way up.

Vegon began a spell.

Xil raised one hand.

Then something moved inside the tower.

A shape slipped through the broken opening.

Zook saw it only briefly.

Long.

Dark.

Almost serpentine, though the body did not move like any snake he knew.

Jandar turned toward it without fear.

The creature passed him.

It moved directly toward Deacon.

“Deacon!”

The fighter fired.

The bolt passed through the thing.

Not missed.

Through.

The creature reached him.

For one heartbeat its shape seemed to spread across Deacon's chest like smoke striking glass.

Then it vanished into him.

Deacon staggered.

His crossbow dropped toward the ground.

Everyone froze.

Deacon looked up.

His eyes were wrong.

Not glowing.

Not transformed.

That would have been easier.

They were simply no longer Deacon's.

Zook knew the difference.

He had spent enough time watching the older fighter to recognize the controlled attention behind his gaze, the way Deacon measured a threat before deciding what to do about it.

That judgment was gone.

Something else looked through him.

“Don't move,” Xil said.

Deacon raised the crossbow.

Zook moved first.

He threw the net.

It caught one shoulder, slid across Deacon's arm and fell uselessly to the ground.

Jandar stared at him.

“You carry a net?”

“Not now.”

Deacon fired.

The bolt hit Zook.

Pain slammed through him hard enough to steal the street from sight.

He hit the ground on one knee.

For a moment he could hear only the ringing inside his skull.

Then the world returned.

Deacon was already reloading.

Zook looked at the bolt buried in his side.

“That's rude.”

Jandar recovered from whatever had held him.

His face changed as he understood what had happened.

“Deacon.”

No response.

Xil moved toward the fighter.

“Do not kill him.”

Deacon fired again.

The shot missed Xil by inches.

“That makes this harder,” Jandar said.

Vegon reached for magic.

Zook forced himself upright.

He had no idea what would happen if they killed Deacon while the thing was inside him.

He had no intention of finding out.

He drove the point of his sword into the ground and spread one hand over the street.

The magic came reluctantly.

Roots moved beneath stone.

Thorns erupted around Deacon.

Not enough to impale him.

Enough to make movement costly.

Deacon looked down.

Then at Zook.

The thing inside him did not seem impressed.

“Stay there,” Zook said.

Deacon stepped forward.

The thorns tore into his legs.

He did not stop.

Jandar moved.

The swashbuckler crossed the space between them faster than Zook expected, striking Deacon with the flat of his blade and then with the hilt.

Deacon answered with a fist.

Jandar barely avoided it.

“Still him,” Jandar said.

“No,” Xil replied. “His body.”

“That distinction hurts.”

Deacon reached for Jandar.

Zook moved around the edge of his own thorn growth, searching for an opening.

This was worse than fighting any monster they had faced.

He knew where to strike monsters.

He knew what counted as winning.

Deacon was their shield more often than not. The man who stood where the danger was thickest and made certain it stopped with him.

Now they were the danger he had been turned toward.

Vegon's spell struck.

Not enough to kill.

Enough to stagger.

Deacon turned toward the wizard.

Jandar struck again.

Xil came in from the other side.

“Deacon. Fight it.”

For one instant something changed in the fighter's face.

Zook saw recognition.

Then it vanished.

The crossbow came up.

Zook rushed him.

He hit Deacon low and hard.

It was like tackling a wall.

The fighter shifted one step.

That was enough.

Jandar hit him again.

Deacon went down.

The moment his body struck the ground, something tore free.

The creature emerged from him like smoke being pulled through skin.

Zook recoiled.

Deacon lay still among the thorns.

The thing rose above him.

Now that Zook could see it clearly, he wished he could not.

Its body seemed assembled from the suggestion of a creature rather than flesh. Long limbs or tendrils shifted around a narrow central form, never entirely solid. Its face changed depending on the angle, sometimes almost human and sometimes nothing but a dark opening surrounded by folds of shadow.

Jandar pointed his rapier.

“That.”

Xil was already moving toward Deacon.

“Keep it away from him.”

The creature struck first.

It lashed toward Zook.

He raised his sword.

The impact drove him backward.

A second limb wrapped around his arm and pulled.

For one sickening moment Zook felt himself being dragged toward the same dark center that had swallowed Deacon.

He cut downward.

The blade passed through part of the creature, met resistance deeper inside and tore free.

The thing released him.

Jandar attacked from the side.

His moon-touched rapier shone brightly against the shadow.

This time the creature reacted.

It recoiled from the silver light.

“Good,” Jandar said.

He attacked again.

The creature caught him.

One of the long limbs wrapped around his torso and slammed him into broken stone.

Jandar disappeared beneath it.

Zook rushed forward.

Deacon remained unconscious behind them while Xil worked over him, divine magic spreading through wounds caused partly by the party itself.

Vegon cast.

The spell nearly failed.

Zook saw the arcane structure distort around the wizard's hand before snapping back into shape.

Then the magic struck the creature.

It screamed.

The sound did not belong in the air.

Zook felt it inside his teeth.

The thing turned toward Vegon.

Bad.

Zook attacked.

His blade bit.

The creature swung toward him instead.

Better.

He ducked the first strike.

The second caught him across the chest.

Zook hit the ground.

For several seconds he could not breathe.

Somewhere nearby, Jandar was still fighting.

That was useful information.

Zook rolled onto his side.

Xil shouted a prayer.

Healing reached him from several yards away, warm and painful at once as bruised flesh tightened and breath returned to his lungs.

Zook stood.

The creature had turned toward Xil.

Deacon was beginning to move.

“Not again.”

Zook charged.

The five of them closed on the creature from every direction they could manage.

Not because anyone gave an order.

Because that was what they did now.

Deacon, barely conscious and no longer possessed, dragged himself far enough away to retrieve his crossbow.

Jandar stayed in the creature's reach and made himself impossible to ignore.

Xil divided his attention between keeping Deacon alive and hurting the thing that had used him.

Vegon's magic struck whenever the taint allowed it.

Zook kept moving.

The creature could hurt any one of them.

It could not follow all of them.

Jandar drove the moon-touched rapier through the center of its shifting body.

The thing convulsed.

Deacon fired from the ground.

The bolt entered the same dark shape.

Vegon's next spell struck an instant later.

The creature folded inward.

Not collapsed.

Folded.

Its limbs twisted toward the center until for one heartbeat it became a knot of darkness no larger than Zook's fist.

Then it disappeared.

No body remained.

Only the party.

And the damage.

For several seconds nobody moved.

Jandar finally looked toward Deacon.

“You?”

Deacon sat with his back against a broken wall, blood on his clothes and confusion in his face.

“Yes.”

“Completely?”

“I think so.”

Jandar looked at Xil.

Xil nodded.

Zook walked over.

Deacon's gaze dropped to the blood on Zook's side.

He saw the crossbow bolt lying nearby.

His expression changed.

“I did that.”

Zook looked down at the wound.

“Yes.”

Deacon's jaw tightened.

Zook understood immediately where the older man's mind was going.

He did not let him get there.

“You missed the second one.”

Deacon looked at him.

Zook shrugged.

“Needs work.”

For a moment Deacon said nothing.

Then he gave a tired sound that might have been a laugh.

Good enough.

Jandar sat heavily beside them.

“I would like everyone to stop being possessed.”

Mills approached from farther down the slope, where he had wisely taken shelter once the fight began.

“Is that common?”

“No,” Xil said.

Jandar looked at him.

“It has happened twice today if we count me.”

Xil considered.

“Then apparently yes.”

Vegon stood near the place where the creature had vanished.

“It came from the tower.”

Everyone looked up.

Darkness had gathered while they fought.

The ruined structure rose above them, its broken windows black against deeper mist.

Zook wiped his sword clean.

There were several reasonable responses to discovering that a tower had contained a creature capable of charming one companion and wearing another.

Leaving was high among them.

Instead, Deacon slowly stood.

“We need shelter.”

Jandar stared at the tower.

“That shelter tried to make us murder each other.”

“It's also stone.”

“You make a compelling argument.”

Zook looked back toward the city.

Night was spreading quickly through the streets below. The fire they had started earlier glowed faintly in the distance, orange light blurred by mist.

There were other ruined houses.

Other unknown things.

The burrowing beast had attacked in open ground.

The gray creatures had hidden among buildings.

And whatever had occupied the tower was dead.

Probably.

Zook sighed.

“The tower.”

Jandar pointed at him.

“I want it recorded that this was not my idea.”

Mills lifted the notebook.

“I can do that.”

“That was not permission.”

They entered anyway.

The lower chamber had partially collapsed, but enough of the tower remained to give them walls, a defensible entrance and access to an upper floor. The interior smelled terrible—old bones, damp stone and the accumulated refuse of something that had lived there long before they arrived.

Zook inspected every corner.

Nothing moved.

Xil checked for signs of the creature.

Nothing.

Vegon searched for magic until exhaustion forced him to stop.

Nothing attacked them.

That counted as success.

They made camp on the upper level.

Deacon sat apart for a while.

Zook noticed.

He did not go to him.

Not yet.

Some things needed company.

Others needed room.

Jandar eventually sat near the fighter without saying anything, which might have been the most thoughtful thing Zook had ever seen him do.

Mills settled near the wall with his lute across his knees but did not play.

Xil took first watch.

Outside, the city disappeared completely into darkness and mist.

Zook lay down near a gap in the stone wall where he could see a narrow slice of the street below.

He had spent most of his life trusting signs.

Tracks.

Weather.

Animal behavior.

Broken branches.

The thousand small things the world revealed when someone bothered to look.

Oron gave him plenty of signs.

He simply did not know what story they told.

A city abandoned decades ago.

Creatures hiding in its houses.

Something beneath its streets.

Something else waiting in a tower to crawl inside a man.

And somewhere among all of it, whatever had driven the people of Oron away.

Zook closed his eyes.

Tomorrow they would keep looking.

He was beginning to wonder whether the city wanted to be understood.