Barius didn’t answer. He stared in shock through the door into the room beyond. His lips moved without speaking. This from a man who had faced hobgoblins, lizard-fish, and even the Necromancer’s warriors.

Jig peeked around the door, half afraid to see what monster awaited them. But better to see what it was, so as to know if he had any hope of running away. His eyes widened.

The door opened into a large, empty room. The floor and walls were made of the same black marble they had seen all along, but the ceiling was a familiar mosaic of tiled glass. In case Jig had any doubts about where they were, a pillar of whirling water stood at the center of the room.

Of everyone in the party, Darnak appeared the most distraught. He shoved his way into the room and stared at the pillar, as if sheer indignation would make it disappear. He counted the tiles of the floor and walls and compared his figures to the notes on his map. He studied the patterns in the ceiling, trying to persuade himself that they hadn’t in fact come back to the very room where they first arrived.

“One forty-seven, one forty-eight, one forty-nine.” He spat on the final tile as he finished his second recount. “How could I have been so far off?”

He had spread his map on the floor to better study their path. Jig peered over his shoulder, looking at the winding tunnels that led from the center of the map—this room—through various tunnels and over what must be the bridge, to judge by the small bats Darnak had drawn, and finally to a door in the upper right corner of the map. Jig didn’t know much about maps, but he knew that the door in the corner shouldn’t have led them into the room in the center.

“There’s no way we got turned about that badly.” Darnak chewed the tip of one dark braid as he paced tight circles around the map, nearly colliding with Jig. “Even if I were off four or five degrees on those turns. A right rotten trick that would be, using eighty-five-degree turns instead of solid right angles. I’ll have to remember that when I get home. I could design a nasty maze that way. But we didn’t even pass over the chasm a second time.

“And what happened to get your magic so clogged up?” he demanded of Ryslind. “You said you were taking us to the Necromancer. Unless he’s a wee fish swimming about in that column, I’m not seeing any Necromancer here.”

“As I said before, this room was blocked to me.” Ryslind’s eyes were cracks of red light as he studied the walls. “I thought it was the magic of the water that overwhelmed my spell, so I commanded my power to ignore this room and take me to the Necromancer.”