Palia closed the door behind her, wondering if it would have any effect on the wight at all. She had no idea if it could open, or even detect the door, or if it was able to sense the change in the air where she had opened the door long enough to let cool, wet air into the library. She moved down the staircase as quickly as she dared, being careful of the wet and rough steps. Happily, she had had her boots resoled in the capital about a month before the Quest began. At the time she merely wanted them in as good a state of repair as possible for the traveling she saw herself doing, since they were getting a little thin. Now, she was glad she had plenty of thick tread on them, to help grip the slippery steps.

Even through the rock, and distance, Palia heard the wailing get louder, and she knew the wight had entered the library chamber above. She did not know how far down the stairs she had come, since she still could not see the bottom. She fought down a sense of panic which gripped her, as she imagined the wight coming down the steps towards her and having to fight it as she clung to the slippery stone. Her stomach tightened painfully, but she tried to relax and pick up her pace as much as she dared. Her left hand guided her, touching the wall, which had become wetter and more moldy the deeper she descended. Her right hand held her wand and its light out as far as she could. She skidded on a step, catching herself and trying not to make a noise of surprise and frustration. She had fallen backwards to stop her skid, and her hip hit a step behind her painfully. Her wrist hurt from the impact of suddenly catching her weight. She concentrated on the pain, thankful that she had not slid downward or over the edge, and trying to use that pain to stop her rising fear. She picked herself up, and kept progressing downward.

The stairs ran out into a deep pool of water. The lip of the last visible step was lapped by almost imperceptibly moving water which was perfectly level, and deep in darkness. She could see no door in the almost complete darkness ahead. Palia’s heart was exploding in her chest as she strained to hear the wight. Not a sound came from up the stairs. Could she risk a brighter light? One that could be seen from higher up the stairs? Trapped by this pool, she had little choice. She could not bring herself yet to even think about going back up the treacherous stairway, since that would mean having to go back to the upper levels and try to find another way down with the wight lurking in wait, or even worse hunting her. He light got brighter. She could see a low archway, about three-fourths of her height, at the farthest end of the watery bottom.

The water started out a little over ankle deep, as she descended two steps and found some sort of ledge. Putting one foot in front of the other, feeling for solidity using the lead foot before shifting her weight, she inched across to the other side.

She found one other set of steps, and the water came up to her knees. Some water spilled over the top into her calf-high boots, sending an unwelcome chill down to her feet. She knew if the water was much deeper, her boots would flood. She did not want to take off her boots and walk across the slimy bottom of this underearth pool, a far cry from South Port’s warm, sandy beaches and cool, shady cobblestoned streets where she had gone months without wearing shoes. These new steps were only two deep, though, and again opened out into some sort of landing or causeway or exactly what she couldn’t see under the dark water.

The yawning arch, when she got closer, was a head or so shorter than she was, and beyond it lay a blackness like the depths of painted black ink. Her light, even when made brighter, barely illuminated the tunnel beyond the arch. Thankfully, that tunnel sloped upwards, and she never had to submerge her boots as she dreaded. As she progressed carefully upwards, her boots survived with only mildly dampness. If damp feet were the worst problem she encountered on the Quest, she would be a happy Sorceress indeed. She initially had to stoop over to fit into the tunnel, but as she went upwards it gradually opened out and she was able to stand upright. The tunnel walls were rough, as if a natural crack between one open gallery and another had been hastily hewn out. For drainage? The downward slope suggested a channel to drain water down into the pool, but why would a staircase lead to the bottom of a drainage pool? She puzzled over the strange underground passages, to take her mind off of more distressing concerns. The tunnel leveled out and broadened, and she could lift her light and see a roof about five feet above her of rough, uncut rock. She followed the tunnel along until it opened into a larger space.

She emerged into a large, open gallery carved out of the rock by unguessable natural forces over an unimaginable time. The ragged, natural walls had a low, knee-high wall of dry-laid stones, barely the depth of a bench, around them, showing some human presence. Palia could not fathom the purpose of the low wall circling most of the perimeter of the gallery. Along one side, part of the wall had been chiseled down to a flat surface, and polished, making a sort of plaque on which magical symbols had been deeply etched. In the center lay a still pool. Its shape looked natural, as if the heavy water seeping through the rocks had been weighed down by the sediment it collected, and had chosen to rest in the floor of the gallery.

The pool absorbed her magic light, without a reflection, and she had no way to gauge its depth. She walked over to the plaque, trying not to rush herself as she once more heard the wailing of the wight far off in the distance. She could not even estimate how far away it was, as the sound bounced and echoed through galleries and cracks too small for a person to fit through. The wail seemed to come from all directions at once. She had no way to guess how much time she would have before the wight found her. She had to have enough time to figure out the spells on the pool and how to diffuse them, and haste would only make waste. She had to be calm. She tried to blank her mind, and concentrate only on the immediate task at hand. Was this bravery? She wondered. Was bravery more than swords and fighting? More than bravado and cuts and bruises? Could bravery also be translating ancient runes in an underground gallery while the wailing of an abomination echoed all around? She had always thought bravery to be something for knights and fighters to take with them to the tournaments, or into battle. Could an orphan girl from South Port, alone underground, also be brave?

The etching was so deep Palia thought she could have inserted her whole finger’s length in the runic inscription. The language was an old magical one, a sort of sorcery cant or argot among ancient sorcerers before the College was founded who did not speak the same natural tongue, a pidgin of borrowed elvish words, words from different human languages, and technical magical terms. She had studied it for a few months at Old Aeral’s urging, and because it was structurally similar to some of the trading languages of South Port’s polyglot trading districts, whose languages she mastered while in Utakk’s School to prepare for a career in trade, she had quickly picked up this sorcerer’s cant. Comforted by how naturally the plaque’s language seemed to come to her, she read it carefully.

The plaque was a warning. But in the way it warned, combined with what little she knew about the wight’s construction, she began to see the pattern of how the wight had been constructed. She shivered, for the truth behind the abomination was hideous. In the days before the College regulated magic, the practitioners were without restraint, and would violate even the most basic limits which had been put on humanity. The wail grew louder. Palia could perceive clearly that the pool itself was the key to the wight. Whatever hideous magic had created it was anchored in the pool, and bound somehow into the water. To destroy the wight, the pool would have to be destroyed.

The pool was clearly stagnant. The water did not move. No water flowed into the cavern, and none was flowing out. There was no dam to break open, and no drain to force the water into. The downward slope of the tunnel behind her was too far away to channel the water to it, and besides the pool was somewhat sunken and she would have to pump the water out of it. Perhaps, at the bottom, somewhere, there was a plug that drained the pool, but Palia shuddered at the thoughts of entering the water. The only way to get rid of water Palia knew in the uncertain drainage of the gallery was to boil it. She pulled out an iron bar from a secret place deep inside her cloak, and began a summoning intense heat. When the bar became too hot to hold, even with her cloak, she threw it into the middle of the pool. A geyser of steam marked the spot where the bar broke the surface of the pool and began sinking. The bar was getting hotter, unnaturally hot, as the magic consumed it. Bubbles began to come to the surface as the magic grew stronger. The process seemed to take forever. A watched pot never boils, Palia though wryly, wishing she knew some way to speed up the magic. She would throw in five enspelled iron bars, if she had them, and if the one had not used up a considerable amount of magic. Unless the pool went clear through to the Unknown Ocean on the Other Side of the World, the reaction in the spell should be sufficient to cause the entire lake to bubble away to nothing. In time.

With a wail of undiluted anguish, the wight moved into the chamber at the opposite end from her, having apparently found its way down another way. Its shroud was tattered and worn, and the abomination itself was clearly visible through the tatters, limned in an eerie, unnatural blue light. The tortured, hideous face looked at her with blank eyes. The wight wailed again, moving its arms listlessly and twitching where it stood. Some sort of dim understanding that the place of its making was under attack, accentuated in the wight’s slow consciousness, had sunken in, and the rusty wheels of its unnatural ken were slowly turning.

The wight stopped at the edge of the pool. She did not know if the wight could cross water, or if the pool was shallow enough to be waded. The wight fell to its knees, and put its hands into what was now a frothing, scalding water. Blue energy flared across the pool, and a spark jumped up into Palia. She fell backwards, an involuntary scream erupting from her as the magical energy surged through her entire body.

Palia could not breathe or even see for a few moments. The pain was more than her mind could even understand, a deep searing of her nerves, but she never completely blacked out. When she came to herself, she could see the blue light the wight emitted into the pool was cooling the water. She summoned up her own magic, and shot a beam of concentrated magical light across to knock the wight backwards. It gave a plaintive wail as it picked itself up. The wight’s blue glow had faded some with the magical attack, so Palia summoned up what was left of her magic and did it again. The wight collapsed into a bundle of shroud, through which only a little blue showed.

The water boiled once more, evaporating into the air, giving the gallery a sickening warmth as the steam began to fog up the air. She could see the wight, still on the ground, swaying back and forth. She couldn’t leave yet, until she knew the magic was dissipating and the pool disappearing. If the wight was still moving, perhaps he could once more interfere as well. The damp heat of the chamber became palpable, and Palia’s clothes stuck to her like they used to on sweltering South Port days. The wight’s swaying grew more extreme, and it lurched to its feet. Palia, not sure of what magic she could project towards the wight now that she had drained herself three times in a row on a magical exertion, could only watch with a creeping sense of horror.

The wight gave a mighty wail, as if it was about to do one last, desperate act of its own corrupt magic, and charged into the pool. The boiling, steaming water consumed the wight, setting off fireballs of magical energy. The shroud, heavy with a soaking, slipped off the wight and floated darkly amid the bubbles. The wight jumped up into the air as high as it could, and landed in the middle of the pool.

The chamber exploded in a magical shockwave that threw Palia back against the wall. She hit the wall hard, knocking the wind out of her, and slumped into a ball. Fighting to keep herself conscious, she tried to struggle to her feet, but her body would not obey. A blackness swam before her eyes, and her last horrified thought was that she was losing consciousness. Then she did.

Palia had no idea how long she had been unconscious when she finally awoke. She knew she had to still be alive, because her entire body throbbed in pain, as if she had been lain on an anvil and hit with thousands of forge-hammers for hours. Her left shoulder hurt with such sharpness that she feared to move it, but the jolts of pain it sent into her were helping her regain her mind, so she rolled her shoulder a little and felt a dull ache run down her arm. She had no idea how long she had been unconscious. The gallery, brightly lit in the magical battle, had only the dim light of her wand, which would stay lit for some days without her direct attention. The wand still lay near her, within reach.

She picked up the wand, trying to make the light brighter, but her magic had left her, used up for a long time in the battle with the wight. And for the wight itself, there was no trace. Only an empty pool could be seen. The wight must have destroyed itself in its attempt to destroy her. The man had said, only by losing her life could she gain it. Only by making the abomination so mad that it would destroy itself to destroy her could she defeat it. That was the difference between the unlife of the wight and true life. A human might die to save another human, but only an unlife like the wight would die to destroy a human.

The chamber shook with the rumble of solid rock sliding. When the wight died, whatever magic held the caverns of Morran together must also have been unmade. How long had the chamber been shaking itself apart? Palia could not think clearly. She was so weak she could not move. She tried to stand up, to run, but only managed to lift her shoulder a little. The pain ran up her neck into the side of her head. To die underground, now, after all she had been through, seemed the most unfair end. A pebble struck her ear. But was her end unfair? The wight was destroyed, and would kill no more. How was that unfair to the children who had lost parents killed by the thing? It certainly was not unfair to the children who would never know that loss, because of the wight’s dissolution. Was not Palia’s life worth that? She knew that to most, it would be. The loss of the dumpy scholar, the boring girl from South Port who studied accounting and magic, the orphan girl no one wanted anyway, would not bother most people at all. They might cheer her deed, but would not miss her.

But Anror. If only it were not for Anror, she would gladly lie down here and allow the crumbling gallery to build a cairn around her. He had been her friend. He had accepted her completely, and had devoted himself to her. He would be so lonely and filled with grief that she could see his stricken face in her mind when he realized she would never come out again. And Aeral. He had seen something in the girl even she herself did not know was there, and had been so longsuffering in bringing it out of her. She would miss bringing him his tea. How could she let them both down? She had to get up, make an attempt. She pushed against the stone ground as hard as she could, and raised herself up to a sitting position. Her shoulder began to go completely numb, and she was horrified of going into shock and not being able to walk at all.

The pool was totally dry, she could see now, and some of the ceiling had fallen into the small puddles that remained. In truth, the pool had only been a skim of water, hardly an arm’s length deep. One rock fell with a wet thump onto the tattered shroud still lying at the bottom. She knew the cavern would collapse soon.

Underneath the shaking of the stone, she heard a different, scuffing sound coming down the stairs, that she knew could not be the rumble of the cavern. She felt someone coming toward her, and turned to see a form hovering over her. Anror! “I told you to stay above ground!” Palia’s protest was weak, and the relief she felt had sent a warm coating of adrenaline through her body. Perhaps she would live. Perhaps he had come to join her in dying.

He stuck his hands under her shoulders, pulling her to her feet in a strong motion, and she gasped in pain and could not breathe for a few moments. “I swore to protect you, and I’m protecting you. That includes not letting you be buried alive. I couldn’t stay up there with the earthquake going on and you down here.” Anror picked her up in his arms, trying to be mindful of the shoulder he had wrenched picking her up, but rocks were falling all around them and time was of the essence. A sharp piece of rock fell across Anror’s hand where he held on to Palia, searing a jagged gash along it. He winced in pain, but ignored it. He carefully carried her down the tunnel to the pool, his arms on fire as he held her as gently as he could manage before him, squatting to almost sitting to not have to put her down and still be upright himself. The oppressive weight of the dark tunnel’s rock pressed in on them as the rumbling continued.

Palia had gone completely limp as he mounted the wet stairs as quickly as possible. He glanced at her face, and she was completely unconscious. He had no time to see if she was in shock or if he could help her. He had no idea what was wrong with her, since there was no obvious external wound, but any attention would have to wait. They had to get to the surface. On the stair, the rumbling did not decrease, which alarmed Anror. Whatever structural change in the rock had been precipitated by the wight’s dissolution must have been more than localized to the gallery below. Perhaps the entire cavern structure would collapse. Anror ran like he had never run before, up to the alternate entrance. Curse Aeral’s old apprentice for having already destroyed the direct route to the surface! He bounded up the winding spiral stairs, trying not to slip.

He went through the hidden door into the library, which neither Palia nor the wight knew had opened itself when the rumbling caused a shift that triggered the mechanism. Happily it was not, indeed, a magical door. The rumbling in the large room doubled in volume, and stones the size of his head cascaded down from the ceiling of the chamber. He tried to push through the narrow stairway up to the cellar level, but the rocks fell too hard for him to struggle through with any chance of protecting Palia’s limp body. He gently set Palia down in the safest place he could find, which did not offer much safety, and tried to find another way out.

The floor rumbled under his feet as he raced through the library, looking for any sort of exit. Desperation clouded his thinking. On the opposite end, near the passage Gath’s encounter with the wight had collapsed, he saw a trapdoor in the ceiling. He ripped an ornately carved wooden molding off of a long shelf, and poked at the trapdoor with the makeshift pole. To his utter surprise, the door fell through, almost eluding his shocked attempt to stop it from falling on him and Palia. Not comprehending the reason why the door would be so loose, he saw he could climb a shelf and jump up to grab the trapdoor’s frame. But he couldn’t jump that high and carry Palia. He looked around wildly. A rope! None in the library. He saw that a crack had formed in the floor of the library, and the walls were buckling.

The thought flashed through his mind: above were the stores. Might he find a rope there? He pushed off on a shelf, amazed that it supported his weight, and grabbed the lip of the open trapdoor. He pulled himself up and through, and started smashing boxes. Sheets! Or shrouds, or tablecloths, but he didn’t care what it was. He tied them together with strong knots, and lowered them down. But he himself would have to go down one more time, because Palia was still out cold. The cracks grew wider in the floor, as Anror went back down. He lowered himself too quickly, trying to find his footing on the shelf from which he had pushed off, but the shelf his boot caught did not support his weight. It crumbled, sending him flailing to the ground where he banged his knee hard in his uncontrolled fall. Pain throbbed. He ignored it, tying his makeshift substitute for rope under Palia’s arms.

He climbed back up, this time using the shelf that had supported him the first time. At the top, he quickly hauled the rope, hand over hand, pulling Palia up to him. The cracks widened as he pulled, and with a rumble that shook even the floor on which Anror braced himself, the floor of the library level collapsed, consigning the ornately bound and beautifully lettered King’s History forever into oblivion. He was horrified that one of his knots might slip, sending Palia back down into the rubble-filled deeps, but he had practiced those knots under Armsmaster Fallir’s critical eyes for years. Even a South Port sailor couldn’t have tied them stronger. He pulled Palia up and secured her limp form in a strong hold, pulling her into the cellar.

The cellar’s stores were on the first level below ground, so he was near the exit, but he didn’t know which way the exit was from his current position. His mind race, and he tried to stop and think. The collapsed entrance Gath used to get to the metal door was in the opposite wall from the stores, so he had to be on the opposite end of the storerooms from the exit.

Before him was a door. He had no axe, and a sword would not cut through a door like this. No time to fumble with the lock or any latch mechanism. He kicked the door using the leg with the knee that didn’t hurt, sending a spasm of pain up into his groin and down into the sole of his foot when he pushed off with all his weight on the bad leg. The door flew open. Never mind his knee, which almost buckled when he picked up Palia’s weight again. They had to get out now, or he would never feel any more pain in his knee again, or anywhere else. Limping through the room beyond the kicked door, he saw daylight ahead. The floor shook until he wondered if he could still stand. He ran with a limping, dragging gait.

Palia moaned, and almost came around. Her eyes briefly opened, and then shut again. He recognized the cellar steps, and wanted to race up them two or three at a time. All he could do was take one step at a time, hopping up a step on his good leg and dragging up the other leg with the hurt knee, without putting more than a momentary weight on it.

As they emerged into the daylight, Anror’s thoughts were so wild he did not know what time or even day it was. Palia limply touched his face with her right hand, seemingly unable to move her left. Palia groggily said, “Don’t stop, sinkhole.” He whistled the horses, and they came. He had left them loosely tied up, fully saddled and ready to go, hoping against hope that their hardened training at the Colleges was enough to keep them from stampeding from the site. He lifted Palia, and she weakly swung her leg over the saddle. Never mind the stirrups, she would have to find them herself. He grabbed her horses’ lead, and mounted his own, quickly coaxing them to a trot. He looked back to make sure Palia was hanging on. She had a death-grip on her saddle horn, and nodded at him through eyes that did not focus on much of anything. He urged his horse to a gallop, not knowing at what cost Palia hung onto her own horse.

Behind them, the rumbling grew louder. The two escapees flew down the path, not even noticing the occasional stings of branches swatting them as they rode. The clearing behind them began to implode, as layer under layer of the ancient galleries lost the magic that had sustained them for centuries, and collapsed. Finally the ground itself gave way, in a monumental whoosh that sucked in many of the trees surrounding the clearing. No longer was there any earth under their roots to bear them up. Clouds of dust and powder ascended on high. When the cloud settled, only a bowl was left. The last traces of Morran were gone. Whatever corrupt secrets remained in the underground chambers would be entombed there forever out of reach.

At some point, they stopped out of sheer exhaustion. All of Morran’s caverns which would collapse seem to have collapsed in one rumble after another. They were covered in dust. Anror’s knee hurt so much that he had taken his foot out of the stirrup and was flexing it as he rode to keep it from locking stiffly in place. The darkness was too complete to ask the horses to keep going, for fear of them stepping somewhere in a misadventure that might lame them, and this was not a time Anror had any urge to walk a long distance. Definitely not, he thought, as he tried to maneuver a way to get off his horse without landing on the leg that had the bad knee. Not that Palia could exert herself much in walking, either. They’d have to take their chances for the night. He went over to stand by Palia’s horse. Palia was senseless, awake but unaware of her surroundings.

In spite of their aches, Anror smiled as he helped Palia down off of her horse. She weakly responded with a smile, and gave him a dusty and halfhearted kiss somewhere near his cheek. Somehow, they were alive, and that counted for something. All of the aches and hurts were merely proof that they lived and had accomplished their Quest. “You did it!” Anror told her.

“No, we did it, together,” Palia said groggily. “Our Quest is finished.”

They stayed a long time at the inn in Pollar, where the proprietress treated them like a king and queen, personally attending to their many wounds. Palia had suffered a concussion so bad that she stayed in bed for a week, fearing to move for aggravating her head, and Anror alternated between rehabilitating his knee and sitting at her bedside holding her hand. Even after Palia got up, she was not up for long at a time before dizzily returning to bed. Anror became increasingly worried, but in time she began to loose her dizziness. All in all, it took her a month to be able to go about normally again. She claimed to Anror not to have enough magic left in her to light a candle, and wondered if it would ever come back. As she walked, she constantly rubbed her shoulder, trying to get it to work properly, and eventually realized she would never be able to lift her arm above her head again. A small price to pay, she insisted to Anror, to have walked out of Morran’s ruins alive. His own aches, aside from his knee, were no worse than those of winning a College tournament, and he bounced back in fine form.

The triumph of the two over the wight was the cause for almost constant celebration in the town. Those thankful to have their lives intact and to be spared from the wight treated the two, after the time came when they were able to enjoy it, to feast after feast. The kin of those who had died hailed and toasted the two for vengeance and paying back the wight in the currency it had dealt them. The stories of the two’s adventures, mixed and mingled with the legends remembered from Gath and Euris’ adventures, became widely told all in the north, and in good time would filter through the realm as travelers took the folk songs and recited poems with them. Even the greasy old innkeeper became a martyr, a hero, and lived on in legend for many generations in the town, and would someday in song and legend come to stand through the entire kingdom as an example of the powers of rehabilitation for even the most unlikely person.

In time, Palia and Anror made their farewells. Palia followed the example of Euris and gave the redheaded proprietress what little money was left from their Questing fund, to be distributed among all the survivors of the wight’s victims. Even the old innkeeper’s widow got enough to keep her comfortably for the rest of her life, and enough to see her son, the young boy who helped Euris and Gath in the stables, grow up and get married and settle on a little farm near Pollar. Still feeling the lingering effects of their struggles, the two rode south at a leisurely pace, enjoying every day together on the road.

No one paid much attention to the two shabbily-dressed wanderers who threaded through the streets of the capital city a couple of months later. Whatever fine circumstances surrounded their going out had not been preserved for their coming home. Any glorious achievements the two might have hidden away in their past made no difference to those who had the pressing concerns of the day to attend to. Which was perfect with the two. They meandered to the College, where the gate’s guards eyed them with suspicion. Only when one produced a long-since-forgotten badge of passage, the Journeywoman’s pendant which had been bestowed what seemed a lifetime ago in a far away place, would the gate be unlocked. Even then, the guards had little to say.

The lawn was quiet, since they had arrived in the time of day when all good students were locked inside classrooms, attention glued to their studies. Which was just as well.

Without fanfare, the Journeywoman Sorceress and her Protector walked hand-in-hand through the open arcade back through the welcoming tunnel to the big wooden door that was their home.

On to ... Chapter Nineteen: Mastery