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“You, too?” Iris demanded, her gaze surveying them with an amazing chill. “And the ogre?”

“We’re a very close group,” Irene said. “I love them all.”

This was going too far. “You misunderstand,” Dor said. “We only-?” Irene tromped his toe, cutting him off. She wanted to continue baiting her mother. But Queen Iris, no fool, had caught on. “They only saw up your skirt, of course. How many times have I cautioned you about that? You have absolutely no sense of-“

“We bring the King?” Smash inquired.

“The King!” Iris exclaimed. “By all means! You must march in and free us all.”

“But the noise-“ Dor protested. “If we alert the soldiers-“

“You forget my power,” Queen Iris informed him. “I can give your party the illusion of absence. No one will hear you or see you, no matter what you do.”

Such a simple solution! The Queen’s illusion would be more than enough to free them all. “Break in the wall, Smash,” Dor caged. “We can rescue King Trent ourselves!”

With a grunt of glee, the ogre advanced on the wall. Then he disappeared. So did the centaur. Dor found himself embracing nothing. He could neither see nor feel Irene, and heard nothing either-but there was resistance where he knew her to be. Experimentally he shoved.

Something shoved him back. It was like the force of inertia when he swung around a corner at a run, a force with no seeming origin.

Irene was there, all right! This spell differed from the one the centaur had used; it made the people within it undetectable to each other as well as to outsiders. He hoped that didn’t lead. to trouble.

A gap appeared in the wall. Chunks of stone fell out, silently. The ogre was at work.

Dor kept his arm around the nothingness beside him, and it moved with him. Curious about the extent of the illusion, he moved his hand. Portions of the nothingness were more resilient than others.

Then he found himself stumbling; a less resilient portion had given him another shove. Then something helped steady him; the nothingness was evidently sorry. He wrapped his arms about it and drew it in close for a kiss, but It didn’t feel right. He concluded he was kissing the back of her head. He grabbed a hank of nothingness and gave it a friendly tug.

Then Irene appeared, laughing. “Oh, am I going to get even for that!” Then she realized she could perceive him in the moonlight.

She wrapped the jacket about her torso-it had fallen open during their invisible encounter-and drew him forward. “We’re getting left b-“ She vanished and silenced.

They had re-entered the aisle. Dor kept hold of her nothing-hand and followed the other nothings into the hole in the wall.

For a moment they all became visible. Amolde was ahead, negotiating a pile of rubble; Smash had broken through to the lower level, but the path he made was hardly smooth. The centaur, realizing that the aisle had shifted away from the Queen, hastily corrected his orientation. They all vanished again.

Castle personnel appeared, gaping at the rubble, unable to fathom its cause. One stepped into the passage-and vanished. That created another stir. As yet the Mundanes did not seem to associate this oddity with an invasion.