I could hardly wait to get started. Though I didn’t want to admit it, I was just as curious a person as Mira. As Bran and Elle left with Mira, I went around a corner to break the line of sight between me and my nephews. As soon as I was around the corner, I gathered my strength, focused on where I wanted to go, and teleported to the roof of Stonekeep Castle.

  Somewhat surprisingly, I appeared exactly where I thought I would. Though it gave me a piercing pain in my left thigh this time, it was worth it. I remembered briefly how I could only “whoosh” myself about a hundred feet away when I first learned I could do it. Over the years I had gradually started going progressively further distances. It helped that my memory had improved dramatically over time and remembering where to teleport to had improved my confidence. According to Lord Warsong, I could teleport across the entire world if I wanted to. I would have to try that out someday, but not today. It took most of the power I could summon to teleport any significant distance.

  Scanning the roof, then the skies for danger, I brought my mind back to the task at hand and walked over to the portal that led into the keep. I touched the side of what looked to be a stone archway on a blank wall and focused on the magic that slept there. I brought it to life, activating the portal, and the edges of the arch flickered with silver light before that light flared a bit and the portal formed within the arch. Beyond a wavy type of haze, I saw the illusory field of blue flowers in the meadow surrounded by woods, then I stepped through. I closed the portal quickly and carefully before anything could get in and attack me when I thought I was safe. Was I being paranoid? Probably not. I remembered someone saying once that you weren’t paranoid if everyone really was out to get you, and that’s the way I felt most days.

  The portals I’d explored on this level acted like stairways taking a person to various levels of the keep. The portals I’d explored already led to places like the first level of the keep, two different levels where people used to learn magic, a level where servants or workers lived with their families, a level that held foundries and smithies, a level that housed most of the thousands of golems of the Adamantine Legion, and the level where the throne room and lords’ chambers were located. There were two more portals on this level that must lead to other levels of the keep, and I intended to find out what secrets they held today.

  I turned to the right and walked down the twenty-foot-wide corridor. I looked at the illusions of wooded outdoor scenes as I passed the two portals I meant to explore. I came to the round chamber filled with illusory white flowers and activated the portal that led to the lord’s level so I could retrieve Mordon’s helm first. I walked through the portal and to the right-hand corridor, around the corner, and down the hall to the ornately carved double doors that led to Mordon and Ismaera’s personal chambers. I spoke the password as I neared, and the golems took no action as I opened the door. The helm was right where I left it on Mordon’s desk. I admired its slowly spinning and orbiting gems for a moment, then put the helm on. As expected, I could see things more vividly. I could also see the various spells of preservation that affected the objects in this room and the castle itself. I hadn’t taken stock of those enchantments before, but that must be the reason things had lasted for a thousand years.

  I left the study and walked out of Mordon’s suites. The double doors at the entrance opened and closed for me without my conscious effort. I walked around the corner to the right, then through the portal. The portals didn’t have to be individually commanded by me when I wore the helm, either. I walked to the left and went to the first of the two portals I had always ignored previously. This one was not in a rounded chamber but halfway down the hallway on the left side. It flared to life as I approached, and I walked through. I stood in an octagonal room around sixty feet wide at its longest points. The portal was situated in the center of the room, and there were wooden doors on every single wall. Directly in front of me, behind me, and to my left and right were double doors, and there were single doors on the walls between those four cardinal directions. I had no idea whether I was facing north or south, but it didn’t matter so much. Significantly, there were four golems in the room that guarded the doorways. I decided I would try the double doors directly in front of me and walked towards them. They opened for me as I approached.

  Beyond the double door was a corridor around eighty or a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide. There were three doors on the left, three on the right, and one door at the end of the hallway. As I got close to each door, they opened for me to give me a glimpse of what was inside. They were all storage rooms of different sizes with piles of vegetables and such inside. There were stacks of different things in each room. Everything I could think of to eat was here in one form or another, and it all looked like it was in perfect condition even though it had to have been in there for at least twenty years. Despite finding fresh food where there should only be dust, I was very disappointed. I was expecting the secrets of the universe to be laid bare, and so far all I’d found was a place to get a snack. There was a lot of food here, but I couldn’t give it to the people of Stonekeep without someone putting two and two together and accusing me of being a sorcerer.

  I went back to the octagonal room and went to the single door on my left. It led to a ten-foot-wide corridor that went twenty feet or so in, then went up a long staircase. At the top of the staircase was a door that opened at my approach. Inside was a round stone room about forty feet in diameter filled with crystal clear water. There was a waterfall that poured from the thin air about a foot from the ceiling on the opposite side of the room. So, this was how water got into the keep, and presumably to the eternal fountains on the terrace levels where the aqueducts brought it to the rest of the city. I looked closer at where the water was coming from and with the help of the helm, I could see that there was a small portal there that led somewhere else. Very clever. I’d bet they got rid of dirty water the same way at the bottom of the keep somewhere. I left the room and checked the rest of the doors in this level. Most of the other rooms were empty, but they were each a carbon copy of the room in the first direction I checked. I retraced my steps through the portal to the main corridor, then went to the portal that was in the meadow with the flowers that shifted colors.

  All right. Maybe the shifting colors of the flowers meant that finally I would discover the Icosahedron. I walked through the portal as it flared to life before me. I found myself in a room that stretched out more than a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet to my left and right. There was another portal made of adamantium directly in front of me about forty or fifty feet away. There were golems on both sides of each portal plus a golem at the left and right ends of the room which tapered to a hallway that went away in the same direction in which I entered. This room had the illusion of a starry night all around me, even under my feet. It was very disconcerting to be walking on nothing, but the helm showed me where the floor was, which was right where it should be. The adamantium portal was the obvious place to go, so I saved that for last.

  I went to my left to the corridor I saw, which led to a hallway ten feet wide with doors evenly spaced around twenty or thirty feet apart on the left-hand wall. The hallway didn’t have the illusion of emptiness in it, thank goodness. It was just a plain stone corridor with a twenty-foot-high ceiling. The first door I came to had a locking spell of some kind on it, but it opened when I approached. Inside was an irregularly shaped room full of strongboxes that were each too big to move. The chests were locked with spells also, but they opened to me when my hand got close. They were full of precious stones that were cut in precise patterns and polished expertly. There were rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, and several other kinds of gemstones that I didn’t even have a name for present and stored in their very own chests. It was the wealth of an entire kingdom in this one little room. I ran my fingers through the sapphires once just to see them glitter, then left it all where it was and went to the next room in the hallway. It was full of chests of gold coins. Not only were there chests on the floor and against the walls, but they were hovering in the air above. With the helm, I could see the magic that suspended them in the air. I manipulated that magic a little bit and found that I could spin the chests around in a vertical circle like a wheel. There had to be a hundred chests full of gold in here. If I filled my pockets with freshly minted coins from some far away place, it would have raised a lot of questions I didn’t want to answer. The only thing I could do was to leave it there.

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  The corridor was full of rooms of varying sizes that looked like they went around in a big square back to the original room with the illusion of the starry night. Each room had a theme with some sort of precious stone or metal, which even included mithril and adamantium, two of the rarest metals on Aldon. There were coins, ingots, and even sheets of metals that could be used for many things. I spent some time thinking of all the things I could do with this, but I felt sort of bored with it in time. I was thinking of how I could use it to help myself, then how I could use it to help others, then thought of how it would affect the world if I were to empty the coffers. It would probably make gold worthless in this area of the world. There was no telling the chaos that would cause. Well, if I needed something, I knew where to go to get it.

  I walked back into the starry room and drew close to the adamantium portal. The magic inside it looked just like the magic in any of the other portals with the exception of an aura that repulsed objects getting close to the portal. That magic didn’t affect me while wearing the helm, so I walked to the portal and through it when it came to life. Beyond was a very large room that must have been a little more than a hundred feet long on each wall and had the same starry night illusion that the previous room had. The floor of this room was different, however. It had silver patterns embedded into the floor in circles, squares, and other mystical shapes. There was writing in gold that moved along the designs like they were rivers of magical words and symbols. I had no idea what it meant, but I could feel the power that waited in this room. It must have been some sort of grand conjuration chamber. Was this the room where Mordon and the other High Magi rebuilt the twenty-one worlds during the Breaking? I stood there for a while soaking it all in, lost in my thoughts, and felt very small. Ignorant, too.

  I decided that it was time to go back to the throne room. If I couldn’t find the Icosahedron with the portals, then maybe I could see it with the Amber Throne and open a portal there. It was worth a shot. I retraced my steps there and sat on the throne. I focused my thoughts on the Icosahedron, but the throne showed me nothing. I wasn’t surprised. I racked my brains about how I could find that gem but ultimately, I came up empty.

  I thought of Mira then, and decided I would check up on her. I was rewarded with a vision of her speaking with Prince Kimorel with a couple of his guards present and a rather plain looking man standing behind the prince. They were speaking about terms for the use of our ship. He must have made Mira wait a long time before seeing her if they were only now talking about it.

  I ended that vision and checked up on Kromwell again. He was still leading the sad remains of his army and still wore the demonic looking armor that his father had favored. I wanted to crush him and the ogres with him for all the suffering they had caused others, but I restrained myself again, thinking of how much more I needed to take the head off of the snake rather than just smashing the end of its tail. Patience was required, but it was a hard lesson to learn.

  I thought of Mordon and tried to find him. I was only able to see emptiness. I tried again for Ismaera and got the same result. I wondered if they were imprisoned in a dark area or if they were dead or something. I tried to open a portal to where Mordon was, but the magic didn’t work. That actually gave me a little hope. Maybe he was imprisoned in a place that was warded from scrying spells. I needed more information, but there were pieces of the puzzle that I hadn’t been able to even see yet. I would keep working on it.

  I could use the throne to see other people, but I didn’t want to spy on them in a creepy sort of way. I did check Fajen’s progress as he worked his druidic magic. He was guarded by two talons of soldiers from Mithram’s army as he worked. From my bird’s eye view, I could see that he’d leveled out about an eighth of the area outside the city. That was a good thing. At this rate, he’d be finished with the reshaping of the ground and decomposition of the invaders in about a week. I hoped he was going to help the crops grow more quickly after he was done with that. He could do it with the grass of the pastures around Warsong Keep, so it stood to reason that he’d be growing crops for the rest of the three weeks he was scheduled to be here. The druid’s work should give people hope and keep the grocers from gouging people.

  Frustrated, I got up out of the Amber Throne. A sparkle caught my eye and I noticed once again the thousand gold coins I had reserved for my own use from the ogre’s strongbox still sitting piled against the wall near the portal. Maybe I should take a suite of rooms here in the castle for my own use. After all, this was all empty space, it was all furnished, I had an almost unlimited supply of food up here, and I had an entire floor to use as my personal smithy once I figured out how it all worked. I had all the raw materials I needed to make the adamantine armor I’d been dreaming about, too. I needed to store that little pile of gold somewhere. Which rooms would I use? It felt wrong to use Mordon and Ismaera’s rooms. They still had all their personal effects there, and I still hoped to find the two of them, assuming they were alive. I searched my memory of the castle and decided to use the suite that was at the opposite end of the hallway from where Mordon’s rooms were. It was close to the library, which I planned to put to good use.

  I just needed something to carry a thousand gold coins in. A cloak or a backpack would be good. To my memory, the only place I found clothes in this castle was in Mordon’s chambers. I walked back there and through the double doors, through the living area, then down the hallway to the bedroom across from the study where Mordon kept his helm. In the wall opposite where I entered the bedchamber was a door. I went through it to find that it was a ten foot by twenty-foot bathroom that was very nicely decorated with white marble everywhere. There wasn’t a closet in here, though. I thought that was strange since some of the other suites in this place had closets. Why wouldn’t Mordon? I walked out of the bathroom and my eye was drawn to the left corner of the room that I hadn’t noticed since it was on the same wall the bedroom door was on. There was an aura of magic there where there shouldn’t be one.

  I moved around the bed and took a closer look. Without stepping into the aura, I saw that it was some sort of spell that repulsed and confused people. Beyond that aura, on the blank wood-paneled wall, I could see the outlines of a secret door cloaked by illusion. Aha! I had never had the helm on in this room before, so I hadn’t sensed the magic protecting the door. I carefully drew closer and found that the aura didn’t affect me. I could easily see the hidden latch of the secret door, so I used it. The door opened inward to reveal a ten-by-ten room with a portal at the other side of it.

  There was some sort of magic lazily swirling in random patterns in front of the portal, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This was killing magic. How badly did I want to get in that portal? I stood there for some time considering. Whatever was behind that portal had to be important. Important enough to warrant using a killing spell. Wherever it led was protected by secrecy, golems, privacy to keep people out of the lord’s chambers, social norms to keep people out of their bedroom, an illusion to keep people from noticing it, a confusion magic to turn people around, a mundane secret door, a killing spell, and a ward on the portal to only work for certain people. This had to be the most important part of the castle, and I was too afraid to try it. What if the helm didn’t protect me from that killing magic? What if I needed what was in there and didn’t know I’d die without it? Was knowing worth the risk? No one would ever know what happened to me if I died here.

  In the end, I decided to risk it.