“How do we penetrate that deception?” Bek asked, glancing up sharply now, eager to know.
The strange eyes glimmered. “We try seeing with different eyes.”
They moved forward to the very edge of the grasses, no more than a few yards from the drawbridge and the castle entry. They had stayed low during their approach, hidden by the grasses, concealed by tall stalks, not because the guardian could see them if they stood, for it had no eyes, but because it could sense their presence once they were exposed.
“Time to use other means to conceal ourselves,” Truls Rohk advised, hunching down within his robes. “Easy enough for me. I am a shapeshifter and can become anything. Harder for you, boy. But you have the tools. Hum for me again. This time, use your voice as if you were hiding still within the grasses, as if they were all around you. Here, slip this over your head.”
He handed Bek a cloak, torn and frayed and dirtied. Bek slipped into it obediently. It smelled of the grasses the shapeshifter wished him to blend into. He took a moment to adjust the garment, then looked at the other questioningly.
Truls Rohk nodded. “Go on. Do as I told you. Hum for me. Use the sound to change the air about you. Stir it like water at the end of a stick. Push what you can away from you. Bury what you can’t deep inside. Make yourself a part of the cloak.”
Bek did, losing himself in the smells and feel of the cloak, in his vision of the plains, burrowing deep into loam and roots, into a place where only insects and animals ventured. He hummed softly, steadily for a time, then stopped and looked at the shapeshifter again.
“You see a little of it now, don’t you?” the other whispered. “A little of how you are? Put only a little. Not yet all. Come.”
He took Bek out from their concealment into the open, his form changing visibly in front of the boy, turning liquid, losing shape against the night. Bek hummed softly, wrapping himself in the feel and smell of his cloak, masking himself, hiding who and what he was deep within. They entered the castle without difficulty, moving from the darkness of the outer courtyards and into the gloom of the inner halls. They penetrated deep within the ruins, advancing steadily, as if they were no more than a breeze carried off the grasslands. Walls appeared before them, looking solid and impenetrable, but Truls Rohk passed right through them with an astonished Bek following in his wake. Stairs appeared where none had been moments earlier, and they climbed or descended accordingly. Doors materialized and closed behind them. Sometimes the air itself changed from light to dark, from pitch to clear liquid, altering the nature of the path ahead. Gradually, Bek came to see that the entire castle was nothing of what it seemed, hut was instead a vast labyrinth of mirages and illusions integrated into the stone and designed to deceive—to provide doorways and paths that led nowhere, to offer obstacles where none existed, to obscure and confuse.
If it wasn’t magic, Bek wondered, what was it? Or was it simply that the magic was so vast and so thoroughly infused that it could not be separated from everything else?
They reached a stone wall thick with dust and spiderwebbing, a barrier of heavy stone blocks pitted with weather and age. Truls Rohk stopped and gestured for Bek to stay back. He faced the wall and swept the air before him with his arm. The air shimmered and changed, and the shapeshifter turned all but invisible, a hint of a shadow, a stirring of dust in a soft rustle of wind. Then he was gone, melting into the stone, disappearing as if he had never been there at all. Bek searched for him in vain. There was nothing to see.
But an instant later, he was back, materializing out of nowhere, rising up out of the gloom, his cloaked and hooded form as liquid as the shadows he emulated. He paused just long enough to hold out his hand, open his fingers, and reveal the third key.