All he could do was pray that it was not the case.

An enormous amount of mystical power and energy had gone into shielding this place, and Max wondered why. By common consent it was an accursed spot. Any folk less stubborn that the Kislevites would have abandoned it long ago. Not them. This was the Hero City, symbol of their eternal struggle with the forces of Chaos; they would never give it up as long as one citizen still breathed.

He leaned on his staff and drew a deep breath into his lungs. The spellwalls would hold for as long as the walls themselves did. If the stones were cast down, he doubted that the magic they contained would endure. The real threat would be that. Siege engines could destroy the stonework and the spells they held would simply unravel. He wondered if the defenders around him had any idea of what horrors might ensue if that happened. Better if they did not really. There was no need to spread despair.

Max knew that despite the desperate nature of the situation, he was really only trying to distract himself from the real problem. Ulrika. He loved her desperately and to distraction, and he knew he could not have her. She was with Felix Jaeger and that seemed to be what she wanted. Of course there were times when the two of them weren’t happy together, which gave Max some hope if the two of them split up she might turn to him for comfort. It was depressing and not a little embarrassing that his hopes were so slight, but it was really all he could pray for.

It was ironic really. Here he was, a man privy to many of the darkest secrets of magic, a sorcerer capable of binding daemons and monsters, and he could not stop thinking about one woman. She bound him as strongly as any pentagram had ever bound a daemon, and she did not even seem aware of it. He had even confessed his infatuation to her one drunken night in Karak Kadrin, and she had ignored it, had treated him with nothing but friendliness ever since. In a way, it was humiliating.

He was a good-looking man, and a powerful one, modestly wealthy from his practice of sorcery. Many women had found him attractive although in his earlier years he had been too wrapped up in his studies and his pursuit of magical knowledge to pay them much attention. Now he had finally found one he wanted, and she would not even give him a second glance. Part of him was wise enough to wonder whether this was part of the attraction. Part of him wondered whether, if she had wanted him from the first, he would still have wanted her so badly. He knew enough of the human heart to know how perverse it could be.

Not that it mattered. He was hooked now, and he knew it. He spent as much time in daydreams of saving her life and earning her gratitude as he did in studying. He knew that it did not matter if the four great Powers of Chaos manifested themselves outside the city, he would remain here for as long as she did. It was annoying, for he felt himself to have reached a new plateau of power, and he knew he should be concentrating all his efforts into his studies.