Once through the door he sidled to the right, hugging the wall. After a dozen steps he stumbled over the bottom landing of a stone staircase. Still gasping for breath, he picked his way up the stairs.
The narrow twisting staircase had no railing and the steps were uneven and slick with wear. Wiz hugged the wall and made as much speed as he dared. At last he came to the top of the tower—or what was now the top. The entire upper section was missing, the walls bulged outward and the stonework was disrupted as if someone had set off an explosion inside it. Wiz looked out over the blasted, fire-blackened stone and for the first time he knew where he was.
The harbor with its encircling jetty, the ruined towers and the volcano bulking up behind him told him. The City of Night! The capital and base of the Dark League before their power had been broken.
A gibbous moon cast a sullen, fitful light over the landscape, picking out the tops of the ruined towers and the acres of rooftops below him. Wiz looked out over desolation and shivered.
Puffing and blowing, he sank down to sit on the stair, his back against the ruined wall and his feet dangling over emptiness. He tried to remember what he knew about the geography of this place.
Almost none of it was first-hand. He had been here only once before, when he mounted his great attack to free Moira from the League’s dungeons deep beneath the city. He had come along the Wizard’s Way and departed in the same fashion. In the hours he had been here he had never seen the surface.
The City of Night was on the Southern Continent, he remembered, separated from his home by the Freshened Sea. It was a bleak, barren land, locked in the grip of eternal winter.
Supposedly the city had been deserted after the Dark League had been defeated. Large parts had been destroyed by the forces unleashed in the final battle. The League wizards who had survived had been hunted from their lairs, their slaves had been freed and returned to their homes and the goblins and most of their other creatures had departed as well.
But the land itself was ruined beyond reclamation by decades of exercise of power with no thought to the consequences. For the people of the North the city was a place of fell reputation where no one but would-be apprentices of the Dark League went willingly. There was nothing to attract anyone to the place and even maintaining a watchpost on the Southern Continent had been considered too difficult and not worth the effort. The City of Night had been left unrestored and uninhabited.
If there was anyone here besides the League wizards they were unlikely to help Wiz.
Wiz ground his teeth in frustration. All he had to do to get help or to go home was to use magic. One single simple spell and it was done.
Of course before he could ever finish that spell the monster in the dungeon would be on him. He remembered the eagerness and ferocity burning in the thing’s evil red eyes and he shuddered. He had no doubt at all the wizard had been telling him the truth.
He listened to the wind whistle through the broken tower and tried to decide what to do next.
A clattering in the street below drew his attention. Peering out through the shattered wall, Wiz saw a dark shape cross a silvery patch of moonlight. Then another and another.
“He came this way.” The voice floated up to him from the street nearly a hundred feet below.
“He must be near here,” the other wizard called out from the shadows. “Down this way.”
Wiz could not see which way he pointed, but several pairs of feet pattered off away from his hiding place.
So they weren’t waiting for him to use magic! Those searchers were as dangerous to him as the monster. They knew the city and he did not. How many of them were there? Wiz wracked his brain trying to remember how many wizards had been in the room when he appeared. A dozen? Certainly that. And more besides.