The wizard raks hurried along corridors of bare brick and stone, the decorative plaster and paintwork having long since crumbled away. The floor under their feet was mud and broken tiles which might have turned the ankle of a living man, and above their heads holes in the ceiling gave the occasional glimpse into the floor above. The shades of those who had once occupied the palace screamed at them as they went past, silently miming the tasks they had performed in life, but the white raks ignored them. Their rak senses told them that there was no consciousness there, that they were nothing more than images of the past.

     The wizards had been given a good description of the Puncturium’s location by Malefactos, who had attended the Transdimensional rift during his brief time among the Circle of Raks, but now that they were actually there, in a palace the size of a small city, they discovered that finding it was not as easy as they’d thought it would be. Tragius led them down one corridor after another until they came to a ballroom in the third courtyard, the place they’d expected to find it, but they were astounded to find that it was deserted and empty.

     “We must have taken a wrong turning,” said the wizard rak in frustration. “Let’s try back that way.” They began to go back the way they’d come, looking for a side turning they might have missed before.

     Suddenly the corridor disappeared, however, and Tragius found himself all alone in a bleak, barren landscape, surrounded by broken, jumbled rocks and with cold, bright stars shining down on him from a cloudless night sky. Where am I? he wondered in confusion, searching around for his companions. How did I get here?

     Obviously he’d been teleported somewhere, but how? He’d thought that teleportation was impossible inside the Shadow. Maybe he’d blundered into some kind of dormant teleportation field, something set up and left there by the Shadowraks to trap any invaders wandering around, but no, that couldn’t be. He’d passed through that very same corridor only minutes before, travelling in the opposite direction. Could it be a one directional trap, designed to catch people travelling in one direction only? But why? Could it be connected with the Puncturium? He turned one possibility after another over in his mind, but all he was really doing was guessing. He’d do better to try and find some solid facts.

     He walked slowly forward, picking his way carefully across the scattered boulders, but then froze as the certainty came to him that one of his fellow wizard raks was being destroyed. He couldn’t have said how he knew. He could only guess that it was one of his newly acquired rak senses which he hadn’t had time to learn about yet. He stood still and concentrated with all his mind. It was coming from that direction, he decided, turning to face it. Somewhere in that direction, one of my men is dying!

     He broke into a run, and got three paces before running face first into some kind of invisible, solid barrier. He cried out and fell down, landing on a muddy surface scattered with hard, angular objects, inconsistent with the boulder jumbled plain he was seeing all around him. What the hell... he thought, and suddenly the truth came to him. This was just an illusion. He was still in the corridor in the palace.

     He summoned all his willpower to disbelieve the illusion, but it was hopeless. The illusion was much too strong. Never mind, he had other senses now, and it was about time he learned how to use them. He concentrated on his new rak senses, therefore, trying to detect the life forces of his companions and, one by one, he got what he thought was the feeling that one or another of his colleagues lay in a certain direction, a certain distance from him. There was Adantus, he was pretty sure, feeling his way along the wall which appeared to him as an invisible barrier in the barren, rocky landscape, and there was Aerethil, who seemed to be standing still, completely motionless. Perhaps she was trying to sense the presence of the others as well.

     Then he became aware that there was something else in the corridor with them, something unlike anything he’d ever encountered before. He could sense its power, could sense its evil and its savage, joyful exultation as it moved among the raks. It moved up to the place where he sensed Gorthill to be, and then he heard another unearthly shriek that was only partly in his imagination. Another of his men was being destroyed!

     That must be the creature generating the illusion, Tragius decided. And it’s using its cover to destroy us one at a time. A terrible rage flared up in him, a rage greater than any he’d ever known before and which part of him recognised as another symptom of his gradual turning to evil. At that moment he didn’t care about that, though, and he pointed a shrunken, knobbly finger at the place where he sensed the creature to be. He spoke a word, and the illusion vanished as the creature gave a howl of pain, its spiritual form blasted and torn apart by the power of the spell.

     Tragius stared in amazement as he got his first look at the strange creature. It looked a little like a child’s drawing of the sun, with a face in the centre and a circular nimbus of rays radiating out from it, but the face was twisted into such a terrible grimace of hatred that even Tragius was taken aback in shock and horror. It was hovering above the prone form of Gorthill, whose already shriveling body was shriveling even more and crumbling into crusty flakes of dust, and the shining rays of light streaming out from its malignantly evil face were thrust into various parts of the rak’s body, including one into each of his eyes. Tragius recognised it from a description Malefactos had given him of something he’d seen during his mission into the Shadow. It was a halluci, a form of undead spirit with tremendous powers of illusion, and it was sucking the life force out of Gorthill’s body!

     Tragius cried out in even greater rage, preparing to cast another spell, but the halluci was too fast for him and jumped away from Gorthill’s body as fast as a housefly, coming to a stop up near the ceiling where it glared its hatred down at him.

     “What in the name of...” began Adantus, but then it was moving again, streaking towards Tragius as fast as a speeding arrow, and the wizard rak felt agony all over his body as the creature plunged its rays into him. It felt as though the very core of his being was being consumed by fire, and the agony was so great that he could do nothing but writhe and convulse on the floor, totally helpless in the creature’s grasp.

     Then there was a flash of light and a piercing cry, and the pain was gone. One of the others had hit it with a spell, he couldn’t tell who. A barrage of spells then followed, the first couple of which also hit the creature, making it scream so loudly that it echoed up and down the corridor, but then the rest passed straight through it, striking the wall behind it with a shower of sparks and rainbow colours. The raks stared in amazement, and then in alarm as they realised what it had done. It was now invisible, and had created an illusion of itself to draw their fire.

     “Use your rak senses!” cried Aerethil urgently. “It can’t fool our rak senses.”

     The other raks obeyed, ignoring the deceptive evidence of their eyes and groping tentatively with their still largely untried and unknown rak senses. An older, experienced rak would probably have pinpointed the creature in a moment, and then have destroyed it with a single muttered spell, but the newly transformed white raks had almost no idea what they were trying to do and could only fumble clumsily with the new powers they now possessed, like a fledgling bird trying to fly for the first time.

     It was Adantus who spotted it first. He pointed his finger, aimed it at the creature and prepared to cast the spell, but then cursed. "It's split into two!" he said. "It must know I saw it."

     "I see them," replied Tragius. "It can’t hide from our rak vision, it seems, but it can create rak sense illusions. So, which is the real one?"

     He hesitated, and one of the two images darted towards him. The wizard rak aimed his finger at it, but realised just in time what the creature was doing. He swung around just in time to see the second image, the real one, speeding at him like a diving falcon, its face twisted in terrible rage and exultation. The rak pointed and cast the most powerful spell he knew a fraction of a second before the creature hit him.

     It was like a silent thunderclap that shook the entire wing of the palace to its foundations. The halluci was instantly blasted to oblivion, as was a twenty foot section of wall and ceiling behind it. The barren wastelands that had once been the palace gardens were momentarily visible through the gaping hole, and then the two floors above came crashing down in an avalanche of rubble and broken furniture, sending the raks instinctively running for cover even though their transformed bodies were virtually immune from harm from such a mundane cause.

     Gradually the collapse came to an end, with just a few trickles of dust continuing to fall from the ceiling, and the raks came forward again to survey the damage. “By the Gods!” whispered Aerethil in relief. “I hope we don’t run into too many of them!”

     Then they remembered Gorthill, and they picked their way through the rubble to where his remains lay, now nothing more than a vaguely man shaped pile of dust. A few feet away lay another pile of dust, the remains of Magjaar, the halluci’s first victim, and Aerethil stood with her hands over her mouth, staring in horror. The so typically human gesture looked completely out of place when performed by the hideous looking, desiccated creature she had become, but in her heart she was still a beautiful, eighteen year old girl and in times of stress she still behaved like one. “By the Gods!” she whispered in shock.

     “They’re not dead,” Tragius reminded them gently. “Their souls have returned to their arks in Crystalwade, and given time their bodies will reform.”

     He didn’t need to remind them that they wouldn’t be given the time, of course. As soon as the yellow sun had set, Mase would give the order and all their arks would be smashed, sending the raks to the judgement of the Gods. Gorthill and Magjaar had simply been denied the chance to take any further part in the mission. Aerethil nodded, accepting the fact, and smoothed down the few wispy strands of hair that still clung to her head, all that remained of the once magnificent mane that had once helped her to steal the hearts and souls of half a dozen Kings. “What was that thing anyway?”

     “A halluci,” replied Tragius, and repeated everything that Malefactos had told him about them. “They’re extremely rare. In fact, that may well have been the only one currently existing in the world.”

     “Let’s hope so,” said the undead enchantress earnestly.

     They waited a moment longer while they paid their last respects to their fallen comrades, and then they moved on, continuing their search for the Puncturium.