“Over here,” Duncan said, motioning him to a spot before the ruined altar and squatting down on his haunches. “Look. You can see the outline of the slab that marked the Portal. Put your hands on it and probe it.”

“Probe it?” Morgan dropped to his knees beside his cousin and rested a gloved hand on the square, glancing at Duncan in faint question. “What am I supposed to feel? You said it had been destroyed.”

“Just probe the slab gently,” Duncan urged. “The brethren left a message.”

Morgan raised an eyebrow skeptically, then let his mind go blank, willing his senses to extend gradually to the slab beneath his hand.

Beware, Deryni! Here lies danger!

Startled by the intensity of the contact, Morgan drew back his hand and glanced at Duncan in question, then briskly pulled off his right glove and placed his hand flat on the slab, fingers splayed, again reaching out with his mind.

Beware, Deryni! Here lies danger! Of a full one hundred brothers only I remain, to try, with my failing strength, to destroy this Portal before it can be desecrated. Kinsman, take heed. Protect yourself, Deryni. The humans kill what they do not understand. Holy Saint Camber, defend us from fearful evil!

Drawing a deep, steadying breath, Morgan withdrew from the contact and looked across at Duncan. The priest was solemn, his eyes intensely blue in the shadowed chamber, but a ghost of a smile played about his lips as he stood up.

“I would say that he succeeded,” Duncan said, glancing wistfully around the chamber. “It probably cost him his life, but he destroyed the Transfer Portal. Strange, isn’t it, how we’re sometimes forced to destroy the things we hold most dear? We, as a race, have done that. Look at the knowledge lost, the bright heritage tarnished. We are a shadow of the people we once were.”

Morgan got to his feet and clasped Duncan’s shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. “Enough of that, Cousin. Our Deryni ancestors brought a large amount of their fate upon themselves, and you know it. Come. We’d better ride on.”

They squinted against the brightness as they left the ruined chamber and emerged into the nave once more. The sunlight streaming through the empty clerestory windows set the dust motes dancing in its beams, throwing everything into sharp relief of light and sooty shadow. The two men were just approaching the ruined western doorway, where their horses waited beyond, when the air in the doorway suddenly seemed to shimmer, as if from heat.

“What the—”

The pair pulled up short, gaping as a figure took shape in the doorway, silhouetted against the brightness: the cowled form of a man in gray monk’s robes, with a wooden staff in his right hand and a nimbus of golden light around his head that outshone even the sunlight. It was the figure that both men had come to associate with Saint Camber of Culdi, the ancient patron of Deryni magic.