Micum ruffled the boy’s hair. “Me, too. Could be a noisy night.”

Seregil smirked. “You know, Mika, I don’t think I’ve ever known your Master Thero to fart.”

The others dissolved into laughter at that.

“The level of discourse seems to have devolved considerably today,” Thero observed dryly, pushing back the tent flap.

“Sorry,” Alec said, then broke out laughing again.

It was music to Seregil’s ears, after the condition he’d found the younger man in yesterday.

Thero sighed and waved them inside. “I shouldn’t complain, I suppose. There was a time when Seregil would have made several comments on the condition of my sphincter by now.”

“ ‘Better up than down. Saves wear and tear on the—’ Well, on the sphincter, my old gran used to say,” Micum offered, sending Alec into another fit of laughter.

“What’s a sphincter?” Mika wanted to know.

“Where the farts come out,” Thero replied crisply. “Now, can we please get to the business at hand?”

“Me, too, Master Thero?” asked Mika.

“You, too.”

Seregil and Alec took one cot, so Mika shared the other with Thero. Micum took the chair by the desk.

“How did the meditation go?” Seregil asked.

“You first,” said Thero. “Did you find anything?”

“An empty corridor, a solid stone wall, and a blind ghost who threw his eyeballs at us,” Seregil replied.

“That sounds unpleasant.”

“Did you catch the eyes?” asked Mika.

“I’m afraid not,” said Micum. “Otherwise I’d have brought them back for you to play marbles with.”

“Ghost eyeballs! I wish you could have gotten them. And I’d like to see a ghost.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” warned Alec.

“The corridor?” Thero prompted impatiently.

“There was no sign of how Alec could have gotten out of the palace past the wall at the end of the corridor, and we couldn’t find any sort of device,” said Seregil.

“Might be worth knocking through it to see what’s on the other side,” said Micum. “If we can get any workmen to come back, that is.”

“I sent a messenger to Deep Harbor while you were gone, asking for a party of workmen to be sent up,” said Thero. “I expect we’ll hear back from Klia in the morning. In the meantime, I have a theory about what happened to you, Alec. At first I thought it was a translocation magic of some sort, something I hadn’t heard of. But then I had to consider your report that the dogs didn’t bleed and the water wasn’t wet. That suggests you may have been somehow pulled into another plane.”

“A what?” asked Micum.