“How?” Riana demanded. She jerked her head toward the sky. “Are we supposed to fly out of here?”

Ryslind scowled. He grabbed one of the smaller sticks. “Watch.” He threw the stick into the air. It whirled end over end for twenty feet, then shot back to earth. Jig heard nothing, but it appeared as though the stick had collided with something solid. It landed somewhere to their left.

Jig stared.

Seeing that they didn’t understand, Ryslind sighed and picked up another stick. He repeated his demonstration. “What you see is the stick hitting the roof of the cavern.”

“What cavern?” Jig asked.

“And you killed the Necromancer,” Ryslind said in wonder. “Did you really believe an entire sky existed beneath the mountain? That those clouds are real? You fell less than thirty feet, yet you accept the existence of those birds soaring hundreds of feet in the air. It’s illusion, all of it. A powerful illusion, but no more. Which means the pit we came through is still there, if you have the wit to find it again. If not. . . .” He stabbed the end of his staff into the dirt.

Before Jig could work up the courage to ask more questions, Ryslind walked off into the woods. Jig rubbed his eyes and wished for a set of those elven lenses Riana had mentioned. For it looked like Ryslind’s feet passed through the roots that had snagged Jig’s boots time after time. He wondered if Shadowstar could provide the same magic for Jig.

“We should stop him,” Riana said. She had her dagger out, and she glared in the direction Ryslind had gone.

“Why?” Personally, Jig thought that going back home was a lovely idea. He thought about Golaka’s famous peppered dwarf roast, finding a corner to himself where he could feed Smudge and where the only bullies were goblins, not wizards and princes and dwarves . . . he could almost smell the smoke of the cookfire. “I say we go find the way out.”

Riana rolled her eyes. “So we make our way to the Necromancer’s little throne room. What then?”

Jig started to answer, then his mouth clapped shut. Ryslind was the only one who could get them past the lizard-fish . . . which Ryslind knew perfectly well. “Okay, so he’s still playing with us,” Jig said slowly. “What’s your plan for stopping him?”

Now it was Riana’s turn to hesitate. “We could sneak up on him,” she said. “Like Darnak told us, against a wizard, we just have to be fast enough to kill him before he can cast a spell.”

“But this is Ryslind.”

“Why are you so frightened of him? Everyone dies sooner or later. If you stab him in the heart, he’ll die like everything else.”

“Not everyone dies,” Jig muttered. “Some of them turn into walking corpses.”

“Jig, stop being such a coward. You killed the Necromancer, right?”

“I was lucky.”