“Have not.” Alton immediately frowned to remove the smile from his face, but he couldn’t do anything about the blush.

“Have too,” Dale said with a grin, and pressed her hand against the tower wall.

Alton cleared his throat. It galled him he’d been so transparent. Best to let it go, however. Yes. Let it go and concentrate on the task before him. He hadn’t the slightest confidence that the two of them together would get inside the tower anymore than just one of them had, but it was worth a try. He placed his hand against the wall, passing his other over his Rider brooch.

Nothing.

Just the harmony of the wall guardians humming against his palm and up his arm.

Actually, now that he thought about it, they felt stronger, brighter. Almost ... cheerful.

“Do you feel that?” he asked Dale.

“Feel what?”

Estral started singing, her voice so quiet Alton could not make out the words.

The vibration of the guardians’ own song intensified.

“I felt that,” Dale said.

“I wonder . . .” Abruptly Alton left the wall and strode back to Estral. She stopped playing and gazed up at him. “Do you think you could try something? Can you do something with this tune?” He hummed the melody of the wall guardians.

Estral started humming with him and picked out single notes on her lute.

“Yes,” Alton said.

“It’s a strange tune,” Estral said. “Very rhythmic.”

“Do you think you could keep playing it? Humming it?”

Estral cocked an eyebrow, but proceeded to pick out the tune, then filled in with full chords and hummed the melody. It was eerie. Alton had heard it often enough from the wall guardians singing in his mind, but to hear it externally with Estral’s beautiful voice was very strange.

He turned to rejoin Dale at the tower, but she was gone.

TOWER OF THE EARTH

“Dale!” Alton ran at the tower, slapped palms against stone, but he could not enter. He tensed, clenched his fists, ready to throw himself at the wall, but stopped himself and stood there trembling, remembering his madness of last fall. After a moment, he realized Estral had stopped playing. He touched the wall. It did not resonate as much as before.

“Play!” he shouted at her. “Play and don’t stop, no matter what!”

Surprise flitted across Estral’s face, but she did not hesitate. Her music drifted to Alton and he concentrated on rhythm and harmony—hummed it in his mind, and it vibrated through him. The wall swallowed him.

When he emerged into the tower, Dale grabbed him before he could take another step. She was backed up against the wall.

“Don’t move.” Her voice was harsh and her face pale in the sickly green light that illuminated the tower. Her shoulder was smoking, a patch of uniform singed.

“Dale?”

“I’m all right,” she replied. “Just—just don’t move.”

Alton glanced around the chamber seeking whatever danger had attacked her. In a glance he took in the blackened, scorched walls, the cobwebs that draped from the shadowed heights waving in the air currents like restless specters. Whatever furnishings had once existed in the tower were now jumbles of wood. In the center of the chamber, the columns that surrounded the tempes stone on its pedestal were scorched and cracked, entire chunks missing from their fluted facades. One had toppled and was nothing more than rubble. The tempes stone itself looked like a lump of coal.

And there, in the circle of columns was a skeleton in a pile of rags, a bony arm stretched out as if reaching, reaching for the tempes stone.

“Gods,” Alton murmured. “It looks like there’s been a war in here.”

“There’s something else,” Dale said, her eyes darting toward the shadowed recesses above. “Something bad. In here with us.”

“What?” He’d shifted his body just the slightest bit and lightning streaked through the tower from top to bottom so bright it left a white-green afterhaze in his vision.

“Duck!” Dale cried, and she hauled him to the floor just in time as the lightning forked and struck where Alton had just stood.

“Gods,” he murmured.

“Told you not to move.”

“I see why.”

Something then caught the edge of Alton’s vision, a flicker of shadow. Something in the tower’s upper regions. The hair on the back of his neck stood.

More lightning exploded, this time high up, spreading like fiery lace, and he saw it, the shadow thing flitting through the air to the opposite wall. It was spindly, vaguely human in form. A tendril of lightning stabbed at one of its limbs and its cry was unearthly, terrible.

Dale covered her ears. “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” Alton stared up into the dark, but nothing moved. The shaft of the tower seemed to suck all the air upward. The silence was dense, oppressive, filled his ears. He broke out in a clammy sweat.

Moments crawled like hours. He detected a whisper of movement, like a shadow caressing his mind, subtle, close. Too close.

Lightning ripped through the chamber again just above their heads, so near Alton felt its heat. The creature hissed and scuttled away. Silence.

“We need to get out of here,” Dale whispered.

Alton agreed. He hoped Estral had listened to him and continued to play her music. He called upon his special ability and wrapped an invisible shield of protection around them both. “Now!” he yelled. He grabbed Dale and heaved her through the wall, following right behind her, just as lightning blasted his footprints.