Wizard (The Key to Magic) Read Online Free PDF Page A

fading embers of a hearth oozing across the floor. For a person like him who had spent a life learning to navigate after dusk, those faint wisps of light were as useful as lanterns.
    Rather than trouble him, though, this impenetrable gloom was almost a comfort. When he had come to, he had felt an immediate and near paralyzing fear. Unbidden and unwanted, memories of his last imprisonment had seized his thoughts. The horror and agony of his Khalarii'n execution were never very deeply buried and not being able to see helped him shrug off that nightmare and focus on his immediate and primary need: escape.
    His bindings were formidable. Chained with steel and enclosed by a magic that made him feel as if he were buried in sand, he was unable to move more than a third of a fingerlength in any direction.
    The steel of the manacles ignored several varied attempts at enchantment and it was immediately apparent that the intricacy of the sound-colors of the spell that pinned him in place had been specifically designed to foil direct manipulation. Shifting continually into new configurations, the gyrations followed no pattern that he could discern and at times it almost seemed as if the spell was ready to simply dissolve into the background ether. None of the ancient magic that he had encountered in his own time had had a similar construction, and he remained at a loss as to how to break the spell.
    After a few more minutes of futile effort, he decided that he had little choice but to make a light so that he could look about in the hope that some mundane opportunity might present itself.
    A ball of ethereal fire would take only a thought, but he decided to try to copy the spells that had fed the cell's lamps. Those had put off neither heat nor smoke and such a lamp would be preferable in this confined space. Making sure to create the spell within the creeping time of the ethereal envelope created by The Knife Fighter's Dirge , he succeeded on his first attempt and happily hung his new magical lamp in the air just above his head.
    Unable to turn his head because of the spell, he could only see those of his captors who stood in front of him. Each of the five was fixed in place by the ethereal blanket of normal time, motionless in a state of interrupted life. His questioner, who was clearly in command, gave off a residue of strong magic that was equal to if not greater than that of Waleck. The woman, who Mar took to be a surgeon or perhaps as Llylquaendt had been a medic, radiated a much weaker disruption into the background ether and the majority of her magic seemed locked in the items attached to her garment. A man to the questioner's left and rear, who wore a similar yellow livery, had the stance of some junior flunky and hardly registered any magical presence. Standing further back near the blank, olive wall were two guards, identically arrayed and armed, who had varied presences, but neither matched even the minor level of the medic . Mar could also sense four more guards behind the chair. All four had magical presences similar to the visible two.
    As for opportunities, there were none. Save for the couch upon which he reclined, the cell was bare, leaving nothing that might be enchanted and brought to his aid.
    Anxious, but determined, he again strove to divine the confining spell, but after a considerable length of time gave up once gain. Having failed to gain an exact understanding of their nature, he had to accept that he would not be able to disperse the modulations. Therefore, his only remaining option was to smash the spell with an overpowering bolt of ethereal flux and try to contain any reaction released when the spell's Vessel collapsed.
    Unlike the often quiescent near-uniform gray background ether of his own proper time, that of this age was a roiling saturated soup of leaked sound-colors. Especially here in and about the dungeon, magic was omnipresent and the number of spells that he could detect within his range numbered in