He couldn’t answer. He had to use his breath for breathing. Talking required more strength than he had, and he couldn’t explain to her what was happening anyway. Nothing is free in this world. Everything has a price, including the magic.

Conjuring pixies from dust motes had been a little fatiguing, but the magic had never before sent him to his bed. Bringing down stone buildings and raising ice storms was apparently different. He was so exhausted, he could scarcely move.

Behind him, he could hear behind him the monks clawing their way through the rubble. He had to run or give up and die.

“Dearest Marcus, sweet love, we have to keep going!” Evelina was saying, her voice trembling with fear. “Please, fust a little ways and we are there, my heart, my own.”

She tugged at him, pleaded with him. He nodded and continued on. But he could no longer run. It took all his resolve just to walk.

“It’s not far now,” she said, sliding her arm around him, supporting him.

He wearily raised his head to see that they had come farther than he’d hoped. The wall was directly ahead of them. They had only to cross a street and they would be standing in front of it. Fifty, a hundred steps.

And then what? He remembered entering Dragonkeep, remembered looking back at the wall through which he’d just passed and seeing no gate, no entrance, only solid stone. On and on the wall ran, without end. Around and around the city. No break. No way out. A dragon eating its own tail . . .

“Marcus!” Evelina cried sharply, frightened.

He jerked his head up, shook his head to clear it, kept moving, kept walking. He concentrated on picking up his feet and putting them down, picking them up, putting them down.

The wall came closer. Solid stone. Fused with fire.

Marcus called again, one last time. “Draconas . . .”

The name echoed in the darkness of his little room. Echoed back to him.

One by one, the echoes died.

The street that ran along the wall was empty. He’d expected to find a river of brown robes. If the monks were coming, they had not yet arrived.

“Yet why should they hurry?” Marcus asked himself. “I’m not going anywhere and neither is Evelina.”

He stood in front of the guard wall, staring at it, pouring his whole being into that stare, wishing it, willing it to give him some hint, some clue of the way out. He risked leaving his little room, risked roaming up and down the length of the wall, as far as he could see, risked using his magic to search for a crack, a chink in the endless stone. He stared at the wall so long that the stones began to shift and glide and he wrenched his gaze away.

He did not call to Draconas again.