"I fear that your son purposely misdirected my scrying attempt," Dorigen quickly added, putting the older wizard on the defensive.
"The last time Druzil saw Cadderly, he was near the mountain called Nightglow," Aballister said, and Dorigen nodded her agreement. There is a storm brewing in that area, so it is unlikely that he will have gone very far."
That would seem logical," Dorigen agreed, though she knew better.
The old wizard grinned evilly. "A storm brewing," he mused. "But unlike any storm my foolish son has ever encountered!"
Now it was Dorigen's turn to eye him suspiciously. "What have you done?"
"Done?" Aballister laughed. "Better to ask what I will do!" Aballister spun about in a circle, as animated as Dorigen had seen him since this whole business had begun, nearly a year before when Barjin had entered the Edificant Library.
"I grow weary of the game!" Aballister said suddenly, fiercely, stopping his spin so that his hollowed face was barely inches from Dorigen's crooked nose. "And so now, I will end it!"
With a snap of his fingers, he left the room, left Dorigen to wonder what he had in mind. The curtain now serving as her door seemed a poignant reminder of AbalHster's wrath, and she couldn't contain a shudder when she thought of the magics that Aballister might soon be launching Cadderly's way.
Or at where he believed Cadderly to be.
Why hadn't she told her mentor the truth? Dorigen wondered. Aballister was planning something big, perhaps even going out personally to deal with his son, and Dorigen hadn't told him what she knew about Cadderly's position, that the young priest was many miles beyond Nightglow. Rationally, it seemed to the woman that letting Aballister go out and deal with Cadderly would be her safest course, for if Cadderly's attempt at Castle Trinity proved successful, Dorigen, no ally of the young priest, would likely find herself in serious trouble.
Dorigen ran a finger along the length of her crooked nose, shook her long hair back from her face, and eyed the cloth covering the crystal ball. Cadderly might arrive in a day, and she had not told Aballister!
Dorigen felt strangely removed from the cascading events about her, like some distant spectator. Cadderly could have killed her in Shilmista Forest, had her unconscious at his feet He had broken her hands and taken her magical items, putting her out of the fight
But he had spared her life.
Perhaps it was honor that guided Dorigen now, an unspo-^en agreement between her and the young priest A sense jf obligation told her to let it all play out, to stand asi they learned who was the stronger, the father or the son.
*****
Back in his private chambers, Aballister held a smoking beaker aloft in trembling hands. He focused his thoughts on Nightglow, the target area, and focused his magical energies on the contents of the beaker, an elixir of great strength.
He uttered the enchanting words, spoke the arcane syllables from a nearly meditative state, losing himself in the swirling, growing energies. He continued for nearly an hour, until the vibrating power within the beaker threatened to blow apart and take Castle Trinity down with it
The wizard hurled the beaker across the room, where it shattered at the base of the wall A gray puff of smoke arose above it, growling, rumbling.
"Mykos, mykos makom deignin," Aballister whispered. "Go out, go out, my pet"
As though it had heard the wizard's request, the gray cloud filtered through a crack in the stone wall, worked its way through all the walls and out of Castle Trinity. It rose up high on the winds, sometimes following, sometimes moving of its own accord, and all the while the wizard's magical storm cloud began to grow and darken.
Contained bursts of lightning rumbled as it soared across the mountains. Still the ominous thing thickened and darkened, and seemed as if it would explode with building energy.
It raced across the high peaks of the Snowflakes, unerringly aimed for the region around Nightglow.
*****
Cadderly and his friends noticed the strange cloud, so much darker than the general overcast of the snowy day. Cadderly noticed, too, that while the more common clouds seemed to be drifting west to east, as was usual for the area's weather patterns, this strange cloud was racing almost due south.
They heard the first rumble of thunder soon after, a tremendous, though distant blast that shook the ground under their feet
"Thunder?" Ivan balked. "Who ever heared o' thunder in the middle o' the damned winter?"
Cadderly bade Vander to lead them up higher, where they might see what was happening behind them. When they reached a higher plateau, affording them a view between several other peaks all the way back to Nightglow, the young priest wasn't so sure that he wanted to watch.
Bolt after searing bolt of lightning, crystalline clear across the miles as the already dim daylight began to wane, slammed the mountainside, splintering rocks, splitting trees, and sizzling into the snow. Huge winds bent the pines on the mountain's lower slopes nearly horizontal and pelting ice quickly accumulated in the thick branches, bending the trees lower.
"We were wise in riding the dragon," Shayleigh remarked, quite overwhelmed, as were her companions, by the ferocity of the storm. Vander grunted, as though he had told them all, but in truth, even the firbolg, who had grown to adulthood in the harsh climate of the northern Spine of the World range, was at a loss to explain the sheer power of this distant storm.
Another tremendous bolt slammed the mountainside, brightening the deepening gloom, its rumbling wake dislodging tons of snow into a cascading avalanche down Nightglow's northern face.
"Who ever heared of it?" Ivan asked incredulously.
The worst had not yet come. More lightning, more pelting ice assaulted the region about the mountain. Other avalanches soon began, tons and tons of snow plummeting down the mountainside to resettle far below. Then came the tornado, blacker than the impending night, a twister as wide, it seemed, as the foundation of the Edificant Libwry. It circled Nightglow, tearing trees, burrowing huge chasms in the high-piled snow.
"We must go," the firbolg reminded them all, for he - and, he correctly guessed, his friends - had seen more than enough. Shayleigh mentioned again that they were fortunate in riding out on the dragon, and Vander put in a word that winter storms so high up were unpredictably and ultimately deadly.
Everyone readily agreed with the firbolg, but they all understood that what had happened back at Nightglow was more than a "winter storm."
Vander soon found them an uninhabited cave not too far from the valley of carnage, and truly, they were all glad to be sheltered from the suddenly frightening elements. The place was three-chambered, but snug, with a low ceiling and a lower doorway that blocked most of the wintry wind.
Vander and the dwarves set up their bedrolls in the entry cavern, the largest of the chambers. Cadderly took the smallest chamber - to the left - as his own, with Danica and Shayleigh going to the right, the monk glancing back at Cadderly with concern every step of the way.
Dusk came soon after, and then a quiet and star-filled night, so different from the storm. Soon the usual grumble-and-whistle snoring of Ivan and Pikel echoed throughout the chambers.
Danica crept back into the entry cavern, saw Vender's huge form propped in the doorway. Though he had volunteered once more to take the watch, the firbolg was asleep, and Danica didn't blame him. It seemed safe enough to her, seemed as if all the world had taken a break from the chaos, and so she slipped through to Cadderly's chamber quietly, without disturbing the others.
The young priest was sitting in the middle of the floor, hunched over a tiny candle. Deep in meditation, he did not hear Danica's approach.
"You should sleep," the monk offered, putting a hand gently on her lover's shoulder. Cadderly opened his sleepy eyes and nodded.
He reached over his shoulder to grab Danica's hand, pulled her around to sit next to him, close to him.
"I have rested," he assured her. Danica had taught Cad-derly several rejuvenating meditation techniques, and she did not dispute the claim.
"The road has been more difficult than you expected," Danica said quietly, a trace of trepidation evident in her normally solid voice. "And with perhaps the most difficult obstacle yet ahead of us."
The young priest understood her reasoning. He, too, believed that the fury they had witnessed battering the slopes of Nightglow had been a calling card from Aballister. And he, too, was afraid. They had survived many brutal ordeals in the last year and over the last few days on the trail, but if that storm was any indication, their greatest trials were yet ahead of them, waiting for them in Castle Trinity. Since the manticore and chimera attack, Cadderly had known that Aballister was on to them, but he had not imagined the great strength of the wizard.
An image of the landslide and the tornado assaulted his thoughts. Cadderly had enacted great magics of his own recently, but that display was far beyond his powers, he believed, far beyond his imagination!
The young priest, trying to hold fast to his resolve, closed his eyes and sighed. "I did not expect so many troubles," he admitted.
"Even a dragon," Danica remarked. "I still cannot believe ..." Her voice trailed off into an incredulous sigh.