The stair to the fifth level let them out among trees.They were black, and they were dead, and they were made of glass. That was the only way Ethan could think of it. Trunks rose up on every side into the dark, straight and bare, their bark so smooth and so black that it shone like the surface of still water at night. There was no ceiling that he could see, only darkness overhead. Silver mist lay over the ground and moved slowly around their ankles."This can't be real," Neo whispered. He put his hand on the nearest trunk and snatched it straight back.Celestia had leaned close to another one. "It's like glass. It's reflecting everything."It was. Her face was in the bark, a little stretched, a little wrong; and behind her face, Ethan's; and behind his, Neo's, all of them long and pale and bent, like faces seen through the bottom of a bottle.A prickle went up the back of Ethan's neck. He knew this kind of place. He'd played this kind of place. The mirror level. Illusions. There was a

The sixth level was a city, and the city had drowned.It had been grand, once. Arches, colonnades, the fronts of great houses with carved faces over their doors. Now all of it stood in black water, ankle-deep in places, waist-deep in others, still and cold and smelling of salt gone sour. Algae hung off the pillars in long green beards.They waded along what had been a street, Ethan in front with the blue lantern held high. A cry came off the stone ahead of them, a woman's voice, raw, frantic. "Help... help me... please..."They went toward it at a run, as much as anyone could run in water to the thigh. The street opened into a courtyard whose walls had half fallen in. In the middle of it, a heap of fallen masonry stuck up out of the water like a small island, and on top of the heap was a young woman in the torn remains of a blue robe, swinging a short sword in wild, panicking arcs. Around the foot of her island, climbing up at her, were things like men made out of frogs, green and slic

After the forge, the eighth level was so quiet it hurt.They came out into a hall of white marble. Columns went up into a vaulted ceiling far overhead, and the air was cool and dry and smelled faintly of dust and old paper. A pale light came from the marble itself, and by it Ethan could see rows and rows of stone shelves going back into the dark, stacked with scrolls and wax tablets and slabs of carved stone."A library," breathed Marina. She said it the way other people say temple.In the middle of the hall stood a broad pedestal, and on the pedestal lay a book, open, its pages as big as tabletops. Around it stood a ring of statues, robed scholars and great beasts. Nothing attacked. But the quiet had a quality of waiting in it, and as they came near the pedestal, one of the statues moved.It stepped down from its plinth with a low grinding of stone. A lion's body, with wings of carved stone folded along its sides, and a woman's face, calm, grave, carved in marble. It came around into

At the bottom of the Labyrinth of Echoes there was a cavern, and in the cavern there was a ring of crystal.Nine spires of it, taller than a man, standing up out of the floor at even distances around a great circle, each one glowing from inside with the sick green light they had seen from the doors. The air was so cold it hurt to breathe. It pressed on their skin and their eyes with the feeling of being hated by something enormous and patient.In the middle of the ring, the Shadow waited.It had too many shapes. It was a mass of living darkness three times Ethan's height, and things kept surfacing in it and sinking back: claws, a jaw full of teeth, a hand. Then, in the middle of the dark, two red eyes opened.The voice came up through the floor into the soles of their feet and the long bones of their legs.so the champions comeyou broke my servants but here at my heart you will fallA tendril of darkness lashed out of it without warning. "Scatter!" They threw themselves aside, and the

The morning sun came slanting over the Guild's training yard and laid the shadows of its posts long across the sand. Ethan stood in the middle of it feeling ridiculous. In front of him stood Celestia, Eric Flameborn, and Selena of the Veil; off to one side, on a bench under the big oak, sat Neo with his bandaged leg up on an upturned bucket and Marina beside him, pale and very upright, with one hand in the pocket where she had put the crumpled letter. She had said she would train tomorrow. Nobody had argued.A few Guild members had come to lean on the rail and watch.Ethan cleared his throat and tried to sound like somebody who knew what he was doing. "Right. Let's start with a spar. To warm up. Eric, Selena—you first."Eric grinned down at Selena, who came up to about his breastbone, and hefted his practice sword. "Go easy on her, I suppose."He lunged. A shimmering pane of force came up in front of Selena with a sound like a plucked string; his sword bounced off it; there was a soft