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make his presence all too clear by exerting complete control over your actions, or, as I’ve seen with my own eyes, give pain beyond imagining.”
    Magda folded her arms as she paced, her alarm growing by the moment. As she walked past them, she cast a suspicious look at the two towering, silent guards standing with their broad backs to the doors. Their eyes rarely left her. For all she knew, a dream walker could be in their minds.
    “Then they could be here in the Keep already. They could already know all our defenses, all our plans.” She tapped her temple. “For all we know, they could be in our minds right now, listening, watching, waiting to pounce.”
    Lord Rahl’s brow twisted with doubt. “I don’t think so. Dream walkers are newly created weapons. They haven’t had those abilities for very long. Imagine how difficult it would be for someone newly turned into a dream walker to learn to accomplish anything useful.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, if you right now had the power to enter the mind of the enemy down in the Old World, how would you pick a useful person? Even if you knew the name of a target, if you weren’t looking right at them how would you find that one person out of all the millions of minds down there? How would you know who to look for, or where they might be? How would you search for the one mind you wanted? If you were trying to target enemy officials, how would you even know who they were? How would you identify them and then find them? Where would you look?”
    He shook his head. “It can’t be easy to establish the right links. I have no doubt that they will soon enough be able to spread like a wildfire through our ranks—and through the Keep—but if we’re lucky we still have a bit of time.”
    “Time? Time for what? Dear spirits,” Magda said as she lifted her arms in frustration, “we’re helpless against them. What good is a bit of time going to do us? We really do stand at the brink of annihilation.”
    “Not entirely,” Lord Rahl said. “Baraccus’s task was to eliminate the source of the dream walkers. My part in this was to create a counter for the ones who already exist.”
    “But without a dream walker how will you know how their power functions, or be sure what they’re capable of? For that matter, how can you know for certain that any counter you create really works?”
    At that moment, at seeing the look that came into his eyes, Magda for the first time fully understood why this man was so feared. There was terrible resolve there, and terrible conviction.
    “Because,” he said, “we captured one.”
    Magda was stunned into silence for a moment. “You actually captured a dream walker?” she finally asked. “Are you sure?”
    “Absolutely sure.”
    “How do you know he’s really a dream walker?”
    “There is no mistaking them. Looking into their eyes is like looking into a nightmare. Their eyes are entirely black, black like that evil thing you described that Baraccus showed you and then took with him to lock away in the underworld. When a dream walker looks at you, clouded shapes shift across the inky black surface of their eyes, eyes so black that they seem as if they might suck the sunlight out of the day and turn the world into everlasting night.”
    “I remember well the black thing Baraccus showed me.” Magda rubbed her arms, unable to turn away from the look of bottled fury in Lord Rahl’s eyes. “Were you able to gain his cooperation, or learn anything useful from him?”
    The knuckles of his fists were white. “He killed a lot of my people, people I loved, and he forced me to kill some of those innocent people he possessed lest he kill me by their hand. He caused us a great deal of trouble, but in the end I was able to use him to unlock the secrets of their power.”
    Magda didn’t ask how he had gained the dream walker’s cooperation. It was wartime. They were in a struggle for their very existence. Every day lives were being lost