Anadar III/I

Prologue

Frantor did not love Sontor.

He did not love the city in its abundance, not in its bustle, not in that sluggish, self satisfied sheen it spread over its squares, markets, and courtyards when the sun stood over the red roofs and the people believed they lived at the center of an ordered world. He loved it only in the one dirty sense in which a man loves a chest in which he can store things that belong to him. Sontor was a container to him, nothing more, a large, noise filled, unpleasantly living container full of people who considered themselves significant and were, in truth, nothing but material, movable inventory, voices and limbs and organs, bundles of fear, vanity, and greed that only needed to be pushed in the proper direction to be made useful.

He despised the populace openly in his mind and secretly on his face, because there he was clever enough to show only what served him. Before the king he played the courtly sycophant with a smoothness many mistook for genuine loyalty. Frantor knew when to lower his eyes, when to fall silent in reverence, when to raise the right objection at the right moment, one that looked like insight but was in truth only flattery in learned dress. He knew how to leave a ruler in the belief that he was taken seriously while in truth one merely missed him once his signature was absent. When he stood before the throne, polite, groomed, groomed even in his humility, voice lowered and posture respectful, he despised the man on the seat no less than the stable boy in the yard. Perhaps even more. A king who let himself be governed by courtesy was, in Frantor’s eyes, merely a fool wrapped in especially precious packaging.

His true interests lay elsewhere. He collected old books, piece by piece, with a patience that might have seemed almost ascetic if it had not been carried by such greed. In the narrow, dark shops of the city, where merchants saw no great moral difference between honest goods and stolen treasures, he had kept men who watched for him. One of them, a dry, nervous bookseller with hands too narrow and a voice that always sounded as if it were begging forgiveness, now knew exactly what news could draw Frantor out of his tower even in the middle of the night. Ancient writings, forbidden copies, decayed codices from dissolved monasteries, travel reports that resembled fever dreams more than records, teaching texts from schools that no longer existed or pretended they had never existed, all of it flowed, when it seemed valuable enough, through this man into Frantor’s hands.

His tower lay within the castle itself, high enough to look over part of the city and old enough that its deeper levels belonged to a time when walls were thicker and corridors narrower. Below, behind a door concealed by shelves and visible only to those meant to see it, there was a dungeon almost no one knew. The space was not large, but it was deep. Stone on stone, damp in the seams, iron hooks in the wall, a table one could, with will, call a workbench, and a frame to which the most various devices could be fastened. Frantor had first used this place only as a retreat, a quiet area for studies that did not need the light of the upper chambers. Then he began to experiment there.

At first it had been animal carcasses. Dogs, goats, birds, once a wolf found half rotten by a roadside and dragged in at his command. Frantor tried his hand at necromancy, that knowledge anchored in the lower and despised fringe regions of the Earth School, not as an official subject of study, certainly not, but as lore found only in hints, in warnings, in half formulas, in those places in teaching where sensible mages stopped because they understood that not everything one can read from stone and depth should be brought to the surface. Frantor had never had any talent for restraint. He possessed diligence, yes, a cold sort of intelligence, that too, and a persistence almost repulsive, but what separates great mages from the merely hungry was missing in him. He did not understand power as order, not as responsibility, not even as insight. He understood it as domination. Anything that did not submit to his will he felt as an insult.

The animal carcasses soon no longer sufficed. They were mute, limited, incapable of showing the reactions that increasingly fascinated him. So he went further. Corpses. Human corpses, procured by detours, by men who did things at night that were not spoken of in daylight. Sometimes they came from paupers’ graves, sometimes from alleys, sometimes from houses where no one counted too carefully who had vanished and who was merely gone. He did not care where they came from. Frantor cut, opened, bound, spoke formulas, tried to summon residual motion, to warm cold, to force twitches, to wring an answer with alien will from a place where there was only matter. Mostly unsuccessful, incredibly unsuccessful, because necromancy did not obey him, or only in hints, a cramp, a stare, an involuntary tremor of dead flesh that produced more disgust than triumph.

Then he began with living animals.

And finally with people.

It would have been comforting if this step had been a rupture, an inner threshold at which he would have had to pause, but Frantor crossed it almost casually, and precisely in that lay his vileness. He was not the type of the raging madman who loses himself in a blood frenzy. He remained orderly. He planned. He documented. He observed pain with the attention with which others study insects under glass. He did not delight in blood itself, but in submission, in the slow certainty that another human becomes smaller the longer one holds their body and their hope in one’s hand. When someone screamed, Frantor did not simply hear noise. He heard effect.

So years passed in the shadow of this double existence, above the groomed court mage, groomed in silk and composure, below the man in the dungeon who probed the limits of magic not from a researcher’s drive but from depravity. In Sontor itself no one truly began to suspect anything. Certainly, Frantor was not considered warmhearted, not friendly, and people avoided him when they could, but mages are allowed to be cold, and coldness often has a reputation for depth at courts. That things were happening in his tower that had nothing to do with study remained hidden because he hid it, and because the world is astonishingly often willing not to see the obvious as long as it comes from a man of standing.

One evening he received word from his bookseller.

Not in writing in the form men of his rank correspond with merchants, but brief, hurried, almost childish, delivered on a small piece of parchment containing little more than the request that he come today. Someone was there. A guest. One with something Frantor would find interesting.

Frantor came after nightfall.

The shop lay quiet between two workshops already closed, the shutters half drawn, the interior lit only by two stingy oil lamps, and the moment he stepped in he felt the room was different than usual. Heavier. Not because something large stood within it, but because a presence filled the space differently than people do. The bookseller bowed too deeply and too quickly, a sign the situation was slipping from him, and then retreated almost hastily.

The guest was already seated.

He was tall, bald, dressed in black, not in mourning color but in that rich, smooth black that never denies wealth, threaded with gold ornaments at hem and collar. Around his forehead he wore a broad band of dark metal or leather, Frantor could not tell at first glance, and when the man smiled one saw teeth a little too sharp to fit wholly within the order of a normal face. His features looked foreign, sharp and calm, and he spoke the realm’s tongue well enough, though with a melody in it that belonged to nowhere here.

Before him on the table lay a book.

Large. Heavy. Bound in black leather on which gold had been laid not as cheap decoration but in flowing lines and signs that were not quite ornamental, more like something disguising itself as adornment to hide its true function. A lock held the cover shut, and a seal lay over it.

“You are Frantor,” the man said.

It was not a question.

“And you are,” Frantor replied, while his gaze already clung to the book, “the occasion for which I interrupt my evening.”

The stranger’s smile deepened only a fraction.

“Maraber,” he said. “That is enough.”

He did not place his hand on the lock, but guided it a small distance above it, perhaps a span, perhaps less, and Frantor saw the metal react. The seal dissolved. The lock sprang open. No sound of force, only a soft yielding, as though the book had been waiting for precisely this motion.

Maraber opened it.

The pages gleamed gold.

Not gilded, not merely shimmering in lamplight, but deep, rich, as though the gold lay not on the parchment but within it. And upon it stood signs, rites, circles, formulas, clean architectures of power that even in his greed Frantor recognized at once as something far beyond what ordinary libraries, even good ones, would ever make accessible to a mage.

He stepped closer, involuntarily, and Maraber watched him as a man who already knows he has won.

“What do you want for it.”

Maraber leaned back.

“Gold,” he said calmly. “Gemstones. And blood.”

Frantor raised his eyes.

“Gold and gemstones are easy,” he said, “but blood?”

“Not for the book,” Maraber replied. “For the opening. For the understanding. For you.”

In the background the bookseller made a sound as if something had gone wrong with his breathing. Frantor did not pay him any attention.

“Explain yourself.”

“I cannot teach you to open the book unless we are bound. The work does not recognize everyone. It does not obey everyone. It cannot be unlocked like a cupboard with a key.” Maraber tilted his head slightly. “You want the book, Master Frantor. That demands a return.”

Frantor did not think about it for even a heartbeat too long. Gold and gemstones he acquired that same night. He took without the slightest inward stir from Sontor’s treasury, not everything, not enough to draw immediate attention, but enough that any honest man would have hesitated. Frantor did not. What was gold. What were stones. Matter lying sluggish in boxes until a man with mind turns it into meaning. Who would have stopped him. A king. A steward. A concept of morals. Ridiculous.

When he returned, the gemstones lay on the table like frozen light. Maraber gave them only a fleeting glance, then produced a knife. It was narrow, of peculiar beauty, too fine for a tool, too sober for a showpiece, and Frantor saw at once it was old. Maraber stepped closer to him.

“The hand,” he said.

Frantor held it out.

The blade cut deep enough that the blood came at once. Warm. Dark. Maraber took the bleeding hand and guided it over the opened book. Drops fell onto the golden pages.

They were absorbed.

Not smeared. Not dried. Absorbed, as though the material itself drank.

Frantor felt it.

First a faint tug, then the distinct awareness that the moment had passed beyond mere ritual.

Maraber handed him the knife.

“With this,” he said, “you will work. With no other. The rites must be begun and fed with this blade.”

Frantor closed his bleeding hand around the grip.

And he startled, not outwardly but deep within, because here too it was immediate, that feeling that something took his blood, not metaphorically, not as imagination, but truly, drinking, testing, as if the blade recognized him and marked him in the same act.

Maraber nodded, as though he had been waiting for exactly that moment.

“The ritual is complete now.”

“And the book belongs to me.”

“For now,” Maraber said.

Frantor did not like the tone in which it was spoken, but his greed was already larger than any unease. He asked no further question. Maraber took his leave with a politeness that seemed almost mocking and left the shop, black and silent as something that had never fully belonged in this city.

Frantor studied the book for weeks.

He ate less. Slept irregularly. Neglected everything that did not drive him forward immediately, and began with small spells, if one could even speak of small in this context. Protection circles, signs of shielding, calls to tiny spirits that were scarcely more than shadows with hunger, illusions of grimacing faces, distorted demon heads that seemed to grin from corners, bindings that, when performed correctly, worked unpleasantly reliably. Everything demanded blood. Everything. Some rites required ingredients that were unpleasantly troublesome to obtain, ash from certain ovens, roots, animal eyes, strips of skin, salt from black pits, but blood was the only constant.

At first Frantor cut himself.

Not gladly, but pragmatically.

Soon it tired him.

Not from pain. From inconvenience.

So he had someone abducted. A small boy from an orphanage, unobtrusive enough to be missed, unpleasantly visible enough to obey when given the right mixture of fear and false promise. Frantor kept him below in the dungeon, sometimes bound, sometimes unbound, depending on what the particular rite demanded, and let him bleed whenever the book required it. The boy often cried at first; later he mostly only whimpered, and Frantor reveled in it, not always openly, often only with that silent pleasure a man feels when he realizes how completely another lies in his hand.

As the months passed, his fascination fixed itself on one section of the book.

The true summoning.

Not the small spirits, not the wretched beings that came and went like dogs scenting a bone. Something larger. Something more dangerous. The passage was marked with warnings, precautions, binding circles, secondary seals, metal limits, mirror placements, blood quantities that even in the reading seemed unpleasantly absurd. Frantor read those pages again and again. For days. Then he set them aside. Then he returned. Again and again his gaze caught on the same formula, on the construction of the pentagram, on the notes about binding and control. At first he did not dare. Not from conscience. From fear of failure.

When he finally made the decision, he did it with a thoroughness he would later be almost proud of.

He drew the pentagram himself on the stone floor, slow, exact, each line checked repeatedly. Over the center he had a cage of steel set, heavy enough to bear weight and withstand violence at first. Above it he hung the boy naked in chains, directly over the cage, so that the blood, when it came, would fall through the grating onto the floor and into the center of the sign. The boy understood enough to sense that this time was different. He struggled. That was inconvenient. Frantor did not strike him at once, instead speaking with the smooth gentleness he had prepared for such moments.

“Just this one last time,” he said as he fastened the chains. “After that I let you go. Do you hear. The last time.”

The boy sobbed, fought for air, tried to hold still, because hope was still stronger than reason.

“Truly,” he whispered. “You will really let me go then.”

“Yes,” said Frantor.

And meant exactly nothing by it.

He began the ritual. The words came haltingly at first, then more surely, the more he felt the book did not lie. The air grew heavier, the light in the dungeon strangely flat, as though even the lamp flames no longer wished to move. The boy pleaded, first softly, then louder, because Frantor gave him further cuts while he lived, targeted, sober, not in haste, but so the flow would not stop. Pain stole his voice only in places. In between he asked the same thing again and again, as children do when they still believe truth will arrive at the last moment.

“You will let me go. Please. You said it. Please.”

“Yes,” Frantor said once more, and then slit his veins open.

The blood fell.

The boy convulsed, fought, died slowly enough that the ritual could be completed, and when Frantor spoke the last formula, a small black creature sat in the cage, lean, with an oversized face, shining eyes, and a tongue already greedily licking drops from the grating.

It looked up at him.

“You have called for me, Master.”

The first attempt.

The boy died the following day. Frantor had the body disposed of and brought another child, this time a girl. Then another. Then another. With growing practice his work changed. He grew better at the bindings, surer in guidance, colder in handling. The demon grew with each summoning, gaining form, weight, malice. Frantor learned to give it commands. He learned how far he could go before the being turned against him. He learned too that binding was easy as long as the rules were obeyed. Demons hated their summoners. That became clear to him soon enough. They did not want to be dominated. They did not want to be called and pressed back, shaped and ordered, sealed and opened again. In their eyes lay each time the same hatred. And Frantor enjoyed precisely that.

Rumors began to spread in the kingdom.

Children disappeared from the orphanage. At first singly, then so often it could no longer be explained by fever, errand boys, or unfortunate accidents. Some asked. Hardly anyone pressed. As long as money flowed, as long as it flowed to the right places, there were always hands that looked away, bellies hungrier than conscience, and so there was supply. Frantor became crueler, not suddenly, but step by step, as though closeness to the demonic drew something out of him that had always been in him. He made his victims more compliant, more fragile, more willing in their hope, measuring exactly when a promise, when pain, when a crust of bread or a stroke through the hair produced the better effect. He did not want an animal in a cage. He wanted a subject in a cage, and ultimately a demon beneath it that became the same.

Because his goal had never been mere summoning.

He wanted permanence.

He did not want to have to call the demon again and again.

He wanted to own it.

One day he did not pay attention.

Perhaps he was tired. Perhaps arrogant. Perhaps it was only the unpleasantly banal circumstance that the human body has limits, and children you bleed for weeks are liable to die too soon. The victim of that evening, a girl, was too weak. Frantor noticed it, but too late or with too little care. He opened the veins, began the rite, and before the last formula was spoken the child sagged in the chains. The final drop fell.

The being that appeared in the cage was no longer small.

It sat there and filled the narrow space in a way that had not been possible before, larger, denser, with a look that held intelligence, real intelligence, cold, awake, and thoroughly malicious. It grinned at Frantor. Slowly. With relish.

“You have made a mistake,” it said.

Frantor already raised his hand to bind.

The being tilted its head, almost curious.

“The human has died,” it continued, “and I have the last drop. I am free.”

Frantor spoke the binding formula.

Nothing happened.

He spoke it again, sharper, louder, with all the anger of a man who suddenly realizes order refuses to obey him.

Still nothing.

The demon did not even rise in the cage in haste. It took its time. In that lay the true malice. It did not throw itself at Frantor like an animal; it regarded him, walked slowly along the grating once, as if testing its new freedom by the rhythm of its steps, and in its eyes lay an almost amused understanding of what was breaking in the mage at that moment.

“No,” said Frantor, and for the first time in years the word in his mouth was not command but plea.

The demon laughed.

Not loud.

Not shrill.

Deep and old, as though this laughter had waited a very long time for this one moment.

It did not kill Frantor at once. That would have been too merciful and too brief. Instead it began to strip him piece by piece, not only of protection but of his interior, his pride, his security, his certainty of being master of the room. It hurt him. Not fatally at first. It let him bleed. It spoke with him. Asked. Repeated. Learned his voice, his gestures, his vanities, his habits. And the more Frantor understood that what stood before him was no longer merely a summoned thing but an enemy with patience, the clearer it became that death, which he had so often distributed to others, was now itself crawling slowly toward him.

When the demon finally assumed his role, Frantor was not yet entirely gone.

Precisely that made it complete.

He was not erased in a single blow. He was replaced. Slowly. Hollowed from within, while outside in the castle courtesy continued to rule, while the king continued to be coaxed with well placed words, while books continued to be hauled in, commands given, services received.

And no one in Sontor understood that the man who soon again walked groomed through the corridors was no longer the same as before.

Only the dungeon below the tower knew it.

And kept silent.

I

The days in the desert grew longer and hotter again, and with the length of the days the city itself seemed to change—not in its nature, because it was old enough that its core no longer shifted, but in its movement: in the rhythm of its alleys, in the way light ran across its walls, and in how the breath of its people stretched between the morning cool and the midday blaze. Gudi began to notice these changes without being able to name them, and perhaps that was exactly the moment when a place stops being merely foreign. You do not truly know a city only when you can walk every street by heart or assign each door to a family, but when you sense that on some days it wakes faster than on others, that a certain market well is busier in the second half of the month than in the first, that the bakers season their bread differently when Vru wanes, and that even the animals in the courtyards feel the approaching heat sooner than people do.

By now Gudi lived deep inside this order, and her days divided almost by themselves into two halves, both of them work—and precisely for that reason she liked them. One belonged to her garden, that narrow strip of earth in the oldest quarter of the city, which she guarded with a vigilance as if it were not merely a plot but a promise she had personally made. Every morning, before the heat fully seeped into the courtyard stones, she was there: kneeling in the dust, testing soil between her fingers, lifting wilted leaves, loosening small stones from the channels where water would later run, carrying buckets, hauling water, sometimes cursing softly at stubborn roots and then speaking to a plant in the next breath as if she had to apologize for the cursing. She still could not guide water there with magic—not cleanly, not the way the older students or masters did, whose gestures were small and whose effect was complete—and that was exactly what drove her. Each time she carried the heavy vessels and the water sloshed against her legs, she thought of the day that would come when she would hold the bucket only out of habit and no longer out of necessity. Until then she learned the old-fashioned way: with aching arms, dirty knees, and the slow, deeply humbling knowledge that nothing grows simply because you want it to.

The other half of her days belonged to study. Not always as formal instruction the way one might imagine it in other schools—with rows, boards, and neatly named lessons—but often in walking, listening, observing, and quietly tracing what older hands did and older eyes understood before looking. Among those who taught her, Gnok was her favorite. He was old—not frail, but softened in posture, the way some men become in age when they no longer mistake hardness for dignity. His back was slightly bent, his fingers broad and earthy, his skin weathered by sun and years, and when he spoke it was with that unforced patience only people possess who no longer need to prove anything. Gnok could hear the same question five times without becoming unfriendly, and when Gudi stood before him with too much curiosity, too many ideas, or too hasty a contradiction, he would often only look at her from the side, brush a bit of dirt off a leaf with his thumb, and say calmly, “If you want to be as fast as your head, you will never see what grows slowly.”

He was good-natured but not foolish, and precisely for that reason Gudi took him more seriously than some of the stricter masters. From him she learned not only how to set a root without breaking it, how deep the soil must be loosened so water does not merely wet the surface but reaches where a plant truly drinks, and why certain herbs would rather die than be raised against the wrong wall. From Gnok she also learned stories, and these stories were often so woven with knowledge that only later did she realize how much they contained.

Sometimes, in the late afternoon, he would sit with her on the rim of one of the old water basins when the shadows grew long and even the more excitable voices of the city began to drag, and without any transition he would begin to speak of earlier times—of those ancient ages which, with him, never sounded like dead history, but rather like something that still stood just outside the reach of today’s life.

“Many stories,” he said once, while turning a withered leaf between two fingers, “are not written only in books. Books decay, are stolen, burned, eaten, forgotten, or deliberately copied wrong. But the truly old stories—the ones carried by many hands across many ages—often still stand where they cannot be corrected so easily.”

Gudi had looked at him sideways. “Where?”

He lifted his gaze.

“In the sky.”

She smiled at once. “Now you’re telling me a fairy tale again.”

“Of course,” Gnok said. “Where do you think truth likes to hide best? In accounts. In decrees. Or in fairy tales told so often that nobody dares take them literally anymore?”

He showed her constellations—not all at once, never with the intention of impressing her, but the way you lead a child through a garden and do not name every plant, only the ones the eye falls upon. On some evenings he took her up to one of the upper terraces, where the day’s hot air still hovered over the stones and yet the night had already deepened enough that the first stars appeared not cautiously but sharply.

“There,” he said, pointing with the slender wooden staff he carried more from habit than need, “you see the Swimmer.”

Gudi narrowed her eyes. At first she saw only points, unconnected, loose in the black. Then, as Gnok described the lines she must imagine—the arm, the back, the long-drawn motion through a sea that did not exist here—the image suddenly leapt into shape.

“Why is he swimming?”

“Because every culture has a different answer,” Gnok said. “In one story he swims through the primal sea that separates the world from the time before the world. In another he is a king who refused to die and therefore kept going until the gods nailed him to the sky so he would finally stop. Fishermen on the coasts read the winds from his position. Priests read trials. Lovers read that everything with a beginning also has a crossing. And the old, who no longer need to prove anything, simply see a man who has been swimming a very long time.”

On another evening he showed her the Tree.

The Tree was not a beautiful constellation. Not balanced, not symmetrical—rather crooked and sprawling, like a truly ancient tree that does not grow according to the logic of young gardeners. Gnok told her that some claimed the Tree had grown out of a first battle when the world was still soft and beings made of greater substance than humans had seized each other by the roots. Others said it was the image of a single warrior who stood so long that he hardened and grew roots.

“And which story is true?” Gudi asked.

Gnok laughed softly. “All of them—so long as you know what to do with them.”

Then he taught her further, not only in stories but in how sky and time belonged together. He explained why the day belonged to the sun and the year as well, but the nights were far less clear because they obeyed the moons and their moods. Tro appeared large and reliable, and many people counted their months by him simply because he was so obvious and regular that even farmers who disliked numbers could follow him. Usda was smaller and quicker, often only a narrow crescent, sometimes nearly overlooked if you did not know when to search. Vru, by contrast, rose large and heavy, his light softer than Tro’s and yet more expansive, and when he stood high in the sky, walls and human faces seemed, for one night, to take on the same muted, silvery dignity.

“People often say they count by days and years,” Gnok said once as they sat on the roof of a low storehouse and the night was warm enough that nobody wanted to climb down right away, “but in truth they live far deeper in the moons than they admit. Not every night is a night. A Tro-night is something different from a Vru-night. A night without a moon is something different from a three-moon night. And when Jonsus is visible, then even darkness no longer fully belongs to itself.”

Jonsus was Gudi’s favorite part of all these stories. She had often seen him without at first understanding what she was seeing: that bright, alien star that did not stand still in its domain like the others, but wandered over the years in a way even she noticed. Sometimes it was visible in the night for a long time—clear, almost too bright for an ordinary star—then it vanished so completely for years that one spoke of it only in old records and in the memories of the elders.

Gnok explained the sober version first, as if to let her enjoy the fairy tale afterward even more: that Jonsus was far away, farther than anything humans could ever reach by sheer will; that it did not truly orbit their world like the moons, but was part of a much greater dance which only the most patient star-scholars dared describe in full; that its long visibility and its disappearance had to do with paths, distances, angles, and times measured not in months but in decades and ages.

Gudi listened and nodded, because she was reverent enough to enjoy real explanations, but when Gnok told the other story afterward she leaned forward and forgot even to restrain her breathing.

“Some say,” he said, “Jonsus was never a star. Some say it was a sorceress—one who was not content to see the world only from below, one who became so powerful that she wanted to go out: out of wind, out of dust, out of years and streets, out into the black between things. She wanted to see the universe—not in stories, not in mirrors, but with her own eyes. And when she finally transformed herself into a star so she could see everything, something greater came, something that would not tolerate even such a transformation, and bound her—cursed her—forever to the earth: not close enough to return, not free enough to truly go.”

“That’s prettier,” Gudi said at once.

“Of course it’s prettier.”

“And sadder.”

“The good stories are usually both.”

From there Gnok led her further into a world she did not fully understand but increasingly loved. He showed her how the star-scholars spoke of twelve planets: four that ran closer to the sun and others farther out, tracing their long circles slowly, cool and almost dignified in their inertia. He spoke of a sister planet that traveled on nearly the same path—not directly opposite, the way children liked to imagine, but slightly shifted, in a way so slow that no single generation could truly understand its course, only the long lines of observers who, over centuries, set the same markings into stone and parchment.

“There are things in the sky,” Gnok said, “that are not made for a human lifetime. Only for patience.”

“And why learn something you can never fully experience?”

“Because it reminds you that you are not the measure of everything.”

Gudi drank it all in with such hunger that once Gnok laughed and told her she listened as if she wanted to memorize the sky before sunrise. Yet the stories did not only pull her upward; they also pressed her back into the city and into what lay beneath it. Because at some point she asked him about the desert peoples, and he pushed the star charts aside, as if this too were simply another sky, only anchored closer to the ground.

“There are more peoples buried in the desert,” he said, “than you can imagine right now. Some ride camels, some dromedaries, some horses, and every people naturally believes theirs is the only sensible way to deal with sand and heat. There are those who move with their animals so slowly through the dunes you might think they belong to the changes of the landscape itself. There are others who travel so lightly and quickly over open stone and hard plains that you take them for an apparition the first time you see them. And then there are the Sondra.”

At the name alone, Gudi lifted her head.

“Do you know where they come from?”

Gnok smiled with an expression that promised less mystery than it showed he enjoyed the question.

“Nobody knows exactly. Some say they come far from the south, from regions where the sand is dark and the sky deeper. Others claim they have hidden oases—entire cities under cloth and stone—visible only to those who are invited. Still others say the Sondra do not fully belong to this world at all, but come from its edges, from places where land and history grow thinner.”

After that, Gudi finally told him what she herself had seen: how she had followed the riders, watched them all day into deep night, how they had stood in the old part of the garden at the corner of her plot, how they had spoken in that foreign, melodic language, and how then the clicking had come and the next moment they had been gone, as if the ground had swallowed them.

Gnok did not look surprised.

That was almost more infuriating than if he had laughed at her.

“I would be more surprised if anything in this city were ever simple,” he said. “The city is ancient, Gudi—older than its surfaces admit. Especially the gardens. These gardens were once a center, not ornament. Down there are old stones, old corridors, old thoughts. Nobody truly knows what hides beneath them—not even those who claim to know a great deal.”

That was enough to rekindle Gudi’s curiosity, and from then on she began not only to tend her plants but also to search her plot. At first discreetly, because she did not want to look like a child who wanted to believe in fairy tales. Then more thoroughly. She ran her fingers along joints, tapped stone after stone, listened for differences in sound, for tiny rises, abrasion, traces that might not be coincidence. Sometimes she knelt in the dust and almost forgot why she had come in the first place, and once or twice Gnok caught her staring more at the wall than at her herbs.

“If you gave your roots the same attention you give your secret doors,” he said dryly once, “your bed might already have decided to thank you.”

She blushed, but laughed anyway.

Now she always kept an eye out for the Sondra—not daily, not obsessively, but with that sharp attention you develop when something has once struck you to the core. And indeed one day two of them came into the city again—not as a whole group this time, only the two of them, both tall and slender, veiled, with the same graceful calm in every movement, as if even their stillness were carried by long practice. Gudi saw them the moment they rode through the western arch, and for a moment she wanted to run after them again like the first time, to take up the old game step by step, wall shadow to wall shadow, glance to glance.

Then she stopped.

Not this time.

This time she would be smarter.

So she did not follow behind them, but returned to her plot, ducked between the plants, chose a corner from which she could see the adjacent path without being immediately visible herself, and waited. The hours stretched. The afternoon slowly sank, the light moved across the walls, first honey-colored, then flatter, until finally it became that warm remaining light that, on desert evenings, makes everything look gentler for a brief while than it is. Gudi barely moved; only now and then she shifted her weight or automatically brushed the back of her finger along a dry stalk. Then evening came. Shadows gathered in the old corners of the garden. And at last the two Sondra stepped onto the path.

They stood exactly where Gudi had been examining again and again over the last days: at the corner of her plot, where old stone met an even older wall edge. They spoke little. One of them knelt. The other remained standing, alert, head slightly lifted as if listening into something beyond mere sound. Then a movement began—so small Gudi almost missed it: a hand on the stone, two fingers in a joint, perhaps a twist or a pressure, in any case something that did not look like magic and yet was more than mechanism. The one kneeling spoke a few words in the foreign language.

It clicked.

Dry. Metallic. Brief.

And the two were gone.

Not in mist, not in light, not in some beautiful wonder. They were simply gone—sunk, vanished—as if the earth had taken them in a single swallow.

Gudi sprang up and in the same breath was at the spot. She ran both hands along the stone, pressed against wall and ground, felt every crack, tried to recover the angle of her memory. Here the hand had been. No, a little farther right. Or lower. She kicked a corner with her foot, listened, pressed her heel down, knelt and searched for a hidden lever with her fingers.

Nothing.

She tried again.

And again.

She pushed, slid, rubbed dust out of joints, searched for that one difference that could make stone into mechanism. But whatever the two had done, she had not seen everything—not the decisive grip, not the exact sequence, not the word that might have belonged to it.

So she stayed.

All night.

She withdrew a little so nobody would notice her at once and waited. Maybe the two would return. Maybe they would take the same route again. Maybe it would be enough this time to look better. The night dragged on. Tro rose. Later Vru stood high long enough that the garden walls in its light looked not abandoned but almost venerable. Something rustled here and there. A night bird perched once on the wall and vanished again. But the two Sondra did not return.

When dawn greyed the sky, Gudi was overtired, irritated, and filled with a frustration that almost hurt physically. She had seen something and gained nothing. The secret was not hidden deeper because it was so great, but because her gaze in the decisive moment had not been precise enough.

Then she thought of the mounts.

If the Sondra were still in the city, their horses had to be somewhere.

So she ran to the stables before she had properly eaten or washed her hands, the night’s dust still on her knees and the anger still hot inside her. There she asked about the two riders as casually as she could, and learned to her growing irritation that they had long since gone—hours ago, in the night or very early morning depending on which stablehand you asked, in any case far earlier than she had hoped.

Gudi stood in the stable yard, smelling hay, leather, and warm animal, and she would have liked to kick a beam.

She had been so close.

And still understood nothing.

II

The mutiny was put down quickly.

Perhaps it was because hunger, exhaustion, and naked fear do not leave the same steadiness in angry men that fury does on dry land. Or perhaps it was simply because Kral’s crew was Kral’s crew, and in their deepest core they still knew whose voice counted more at sea, and even now, stranded, counted more than the loud rebellion of a few. When the first insults flew and one of the hotheads took a step too far forward, it was not even Kral himself who drew first, but one of his old hands, a broad shouldered helmsman who had proved more than once over the past years that loyalty does not make you soft, it makes you fast. After that everything happened so swiftly that afterward no one could say with certainty who struck the first blow, only that steel flashed, sand was churned, someone screamed, someone fell, and within moments two of the ringleaders lay on the wet, darkening shore while the sea behind them still broke against the remains of the ship.

That was enough.

The courage of the others, who only a heartbeat ago had believed the matter could be decided with words, with threats, perhaps with a handful of thrown planks, collapsed the moment they understood that Kral meant to demand the same price for disobedience on this island as he did on deck. It went quiet, an unpleasant kind of quiet, and into that silence Kral said only that anyone who still wanted to talk could do so now, clearly and loudly, so that no one could later claim he had been forbidden to speak. No one spoke. Kral liked that. Not out of cruelty, though there was some of that in him too, but because a man in his position could not afford a half open order. Either they obeyed, or they would die, and Kral was not prepared to tolerate both possibilities at once.

He drove them away from the beach that very hour.

The place felt too open to him, too close to the water, too close to the thought that the creature might return. And though night was already falling and many of the men would have preferred to stay where they had crawled out of the sea, he pushed them on, over slick rocks, through a narrow belt of tough scrub, until they found a slight rise at the edge of the forest, high enough to keep the beach in sight below, deep enough in shadow to be less visible themselves. They spent the night there, poorly, shivering, on wet ground among roots, with too few blankets, too much salt on their skin, and that raw, irritated vigilance that makes men bad conversationalists and worse dreamers. Some slept almost at once, crushed by the last days. Others lay awake and stared into the forest darkness, where things rustled and chirped and now and then sounded as if something larger moved through the undergrowth. Kral himself hardly slept. He sat for a long time with his back against a trunk, his sword laid across his knees, listening more to the sea than to the land.

The next morning he split the crew.

He sent the experienced men, the ones who knew what to do with planks and hulls, rigging, nails and pitch, back to the ship’s remains to see what could still be salvaged and whether the wreck, as it was, was worth more as material or as a ship. The less experienced, the young ones, the half sailors, the men who had ended up on his deck more from poverty than true seamanship, were to scout the island, find water, fruit, animals, paths, dangers, everything that decided whether this island would become a temporary camp or a slow death.

The first surprise was how much of the ship was still there.

The hull had suffered badly, that much was beyond question. One side was torn wide open, several planks split, the keel had taken a blow that made Kral clench his teeth at the sight, and yet it was not the complete ruin he had expected in the night. Parts of the ship had been pressed onto a shallow sandbank, other sections wedged between rocks so they had not been dragged fully out and smashed apart. Tools turned up, crates as well, nails in astonishing quantity, ropes, hammers, part of the spare planking, even barrels that had remained tight in spite of everything. One of his carpenters, a wiry man with eyes like drill bits and hands that understood wood better than many people understood words, crawled under the tilted hull, felt the breaks, knocked here, pressed there, stepped back, and declared in the unpleasantly matter of fact tone that often accompanies real skill that the state was bad, but not beyond saving. With time. With timber. With work. With a great deal of work. Possibly, he said, perhaps even with several months, they could get the ship back into the water.

Kral decided at once that this had to be their goal now.

They secured what they could, hauled usable pieces higher up the beach, covered tools, set up a kind of work area, and began first measures the same day, not because they believed the ship could be made seaworthy quickly, but because stillness in such circumstances is poison. A ship does not become watertight through hope alone.

The other party returned by afternoon with better news than Kral had expected. There was fresh water inland. Not just behind the beach, not in a convenient streambed, but farther in, where the forest thickened and the land rose. There the island quickly grew steeper, volcanic in its rock, dark, harsh, streaked in places with old cooled flow stone that looked as if something molten and violent had once chewed its way through. They heard birds, many of them, not all pleasant, along with the rustle and screech of unknown creatures, and among the dense green they found fruit, some sweet, some unpleasantly bitter, until one man came upon a kind of wild fig that, after cautious tasting, proved edible.

The next day Kral sent out two more groups, this time along the shore, one in each direction, with a clear order to scout coast, rock, and waterline as far as was possible in two days. Both groups returned almost at the same time, exhausted, sun burned, and with that grim satisfaction men wear when a suspicion is confirmed that they would rather not have wagered on. The island could be circled in two days. So it was neither tiny nor large enough to nurture hopes of hidden valleys or unreachable settlements. Far out, they said, more islands could be seen, and reefs too, pale lines in the water that in the right light looked like dirty teeth rising from the sea.

That settled what Kral had suspected anyway. They were far away. Very far. The storm must have driven them far east, farther than he liked, and his sense of direction helped only so much because the sea had tossed him so thoroughly in the last days that everything that normally gave him measure, stars, coastlines, wind patterns, had fallen apart into an unpleasantly loose memory.

So the days on the island began.

They felled trees, hesitant at first, then more systematically as they learned which trunks were usable and which were too quick and soft to rot. They built better shelters. They could light fires safely now, and soon there was a fixed area at the edge of the beach where cooking, drying, mending, and swearing happened. One group began fishing, failing at first, then with growing success, because the water in certain spots swarmed with small silvery creatures that could be taken well with patience and the right spear tips. Others gathered shellfish, cracked them open, learned which could be eaten raw and which only wrecked the stomach. Life became hard, but ordered, and that order helped. Men endure misery better when it has hours, tasks, and an evening exhaustion.

And yet Kral was never completely sure the sea had truly let them go.

Some evenings he stood alone at the tide line and looked out over the darkening surface where the sun sank in red gold and the distant islands became nothing but shadows, and he always thought he saw more movement out there than there could be. They did not see the creature again in those first days, not once, and still the feeling of being watched stayed so stubborn that even the men rarely worked with their backs to the water.

Then, just as they had settled a little and that unpleasantly deceptive state had arrived in which even a miserable life begins to feel like a temporary home, the boats appeared.

They came in the morning, at first only as dark points on the water, then clearer, narrow and fast, with sails that did not look like the European or southern rectangles Kral was used to, but lighter, slanted, as if built of wind and skill in equal measure. There were three boats, carrying a considerable number of people, perhaps thirty in all, and the closer they drew the clearer it became that these people had not been drifted here by chance. They rowed well. Too well for simple fishermen. And they were armed, with bows, spears, knives, some also with clubs or short blades, and their bodies bore tattoos, not randomly placed but artful and dense, as if stories and rank lay directly in the skin. They were smaller than many men of Kral’s own people, but more powerfully built, dark skinned, broad in shoulders and back, with a kind of agility that comes from certain balance rather than sheer muscle.

They did not land directly beside the shipwrecked men, but at some distance, dragged their boats up onto gravel and sand, and immediately spread out with a caution that had nothing of fear in it. Five of them approached. The others stayed back, far enough not to seem intrusive, close enough to intervene in moments. Kral noticed at once that the number had been chosen deliberately. Five coming toward him, the rest arranged so that in an emergency there would be as many armed men behind them as there were sailors on shore. No shouted threat. A calculation.

They came straight to him.

Not to the biggest man. Not to the one with the finest sword. To him.

One of the five stepped forward and spoke in a language Kral did not understand, but whose sound was soft and open, many vowels, clear rhythm, not hurried, almost singing, and from that alone one could feel that this man knew very well whom he was speaking to.

Kral understood nothing.

That did not seem to surprise the stranger. He even smiled, a brief, almost friendly smile, and immediately began to work with gestures. He pointed at Kral, laid a hand to his own chest, made an inviting motion, gestured out to the sea, then back to Kral, as if to say they wanted him to speak somewhere else, with someone more important than him.

Kral hesitated.

Then more gestures followed, this time three fingers held up, then the forefinger at Kral again, then a broad open hand motion which Kral took to mean he could bring three men with him. He looked to his crew, chose two of the most reliable, and left the others behind with clear instructions.

They set off.

Not straight back to the nearest island, but first along the shore to a point where the neighboring island lay closer, then out onto open water, where the men set sail and rowed at the same time, fast, very fast, in a practiced motion that impressed Kral against his will. It was not raw strength that carried these boats, but perfect coordination. So they moved from island to island, first the next, then another, then another, each time threading between reefs, through narrow channels, over water that was sometimes turquoise and shallow, sometimes suddenly dark and deep, and the farther they went the clearer it became that this was not a random scatter of islands but a region known, read, and mastered by people.

At last they reached a larger island.

The sand on its beach was paler, and behind it dense growth began almost at once. From there a path led inland, not a mere track, but an old deliberately set climb of stone whose steps were irregular but not accidental. Carved wooden figures stood everywhere, some tall, some low, painted in strong colors, red, black, white, blue, figures with tongues thrust out, eyes wide, spirals, patterns, ancestors or spirits, Kral did not know, but he understood this was not a place one walked through carelessly.

They were guided upward.

Not like prisoners, more like visitors who were not meant to choose their own direction.

Above they reached a stone platform, broad and kept clean, where a large open house stood, impressive in its build, the wood richly ornamented, the front covered in carvings, painted in many colors so that it seemed to glow even in the afternoon half shade. Inside a fire burned, and by that fire sat an older man, straight backed, calm, with the kind of authority that does not come from posture alone but from everyone else knowing it is obeyed.

He motioned for them to sit.

Bowls were passed, holding a drink, slightly bitter, warm, not unpleasant, and for a long time no one spoke. Kral did not mind. Silence among strangers is often more honest than speaking too quickly.

Then the elder began to speak.

To Kral’s relief he did so in a broken but understandable tongue, as if he had once dealt with sailors or traders and retained enough to make clear what was necessary.

“You are welcome,” he said slowly, “to stay on your island. Repair your ship. With wood, stone, water, fish, and everything that island gives you.”

He paused, looked straight at Kral, and continued.

“Everything else is taboo. Do not step on other islands. Do not land. Do not take. If you do, we will hunt you.”

He did not say it loudly. That was precisely why it did not sound like a threat, but like law.

“We watch you,” he went on. “Day and night. Stay on your island. Live off what you find there. Then you will be left alone.”

Kral nodded, slowly enough to show assent without seeming submissive. Of course he tried to bargain. He spoke of the ship, of men, of nails, of tools, of the possibility of trade, of counter gifts, of help people could offer each other in such situations. The elder listened politely. He shook his head just as politely. With every request the no stayed the same. Only the form around it changed.

“Your island,” he said once, “is enough.”

“Enough,” Kral said, “is a word men speak easily when they do not have to sleep with my problems.”

The elder smiled, barely.

“You still have your men. Your tools. Your island. Others had less.”

It was unpleasantly hard to answer that without sounding petty.

Just as Kral was about to try again, a voice joined from the side, so suddenly that for a moment he did not know where it had come from. It had a strange singsong, soft and yet somehow cool. The language this time was the same as the elder’s, but clearer, more fluent, with a melody that made even the plain question sound oddly distinctive.

“Do you know what that monster is that hunted you.”

Kral turned his head.

Only now did he notice the two figures.

They were tall, very tall, taller than all the islanders, and at the same time narrow and muscular in a way that suggested not hunger but a different design of body. Their limbs were unusually long, not deformed, but long enough that the first glance struggled to place them. Kral had the unpleasant impression he had overlooked them though they must have been in the room the entire time. Perhaps it was their skin, shaded in tones that seemed to adjust to the background, not perfectly, but enough to soften outlines. Perhaps it was because they had almost not moved at all.

They were nothing like the islanders.

Both wore leather, rough and yet carefully fitted, with simple loin cloths. The woman, if it was a woman, wore a breast band and a cap, or tight leather skull covering, from which hair showed, white blue, or perhaps only so in the light, and at times, Kral thought, the color shifted slightly as if it were not entirely fixed. The other was dressed similarly, equally slender, with sharp features and eyes whose color Kral could not pin down because they had stood too long in shadow.

Kral answered truthfully.

He described what he had seen as well as he could: the long body, the movements, the tentacles or limbs, the horn, the attacks, the feeling that the creature had deliberately kept them away from land, and also the singing that had lain over the sea again and again, as if it came from voices no visible mouth carried.

The two listened closely.

Neither interrupted him.

When he finished, they glanced at each other, and in that look was something Kral could not read, neither fear nor surprise, more like confirmation.

“Nothing else,” the singing voice asked again. “Nothing different. Nothing known. No name. No sign.”

Kral shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “If I knew more, I probably would not be sitting here, and I would still have my ship.”

They seemed satisfied with that, at least for the moment.

But Kral felt his answer had set something in motion, and that the islands he had washed up on were far less accidental, and far less innocent, than he had believed that morning.

III

They rode out of Zoordak, and scarcely had they left the city’s sheltering heights behind when that fine, unpleasantly cold drizzle set in, the kind that did not really want to count as rain and yet seeped into everything, gathering in hair, clinging to eyelashes, darkening leather, and in irregular intervals turning into thin, nervous snow, as if even the weather could not decide whether it still wished to be autumn or was already winter. Over the stones of the road a slick film soon formed from water and half collapsed ice, and the landscape opening before them wore that colorless, dissolved murk of the late year, in which roads, fields, hedges, and distant hills seem to run into one another until everything looks only like cold, thaw, and wet wood. None of them spoke much. It was too miserable for that, and perhaps also because each of them rode with a different weight. Morgut pulled his cloak tighter and occasionally muttered quiet curses at the weather, the saddle girth, or wet gloves. Miene and Sindra rode in silence, both sunk into their own thoughts. And Shara kept, as far as the road allowed, always close to Anadar, taking small things from his hand before he had to ask, wordlessly straightening a strap for him, handing him water when he did not think of it, doing all of it with a matter of factness that held neither servitude nor demonstrative care, but the clear knowledge of what was going on inside him.

Naaarstr seemed offended.

That was perhaps the wrong word for a being of his kind, and yet it captured the tone with surprising accuracy. Since Anadar had taken the sword back, the voice spoke only rarely, and when it did, it was almost always that dark, drawn out blood, which sounded less like a command than like a sulky hint, as if the demon wanted to make it clear that he was still there, but at the moment did not feel he was bound to a particularly grateful bearer. That, of all things, took some of the terror out of it for Anadar. Perhaps it was foolish, perhaps only exhaustion, but the demon had lost a little of his absolute dominance since Anadar had not only resisted him, but begun to speak with him. What is dreadful does not always remain equally dreadful once it gains a voice, a rhythm, a character. It does not become smaller. Only more graspable.

On the first day, though, Anadar’s mind was still too occupied with the Conclave for him to focus fully on the sword. Again and again he returned to the same points, in loops that ran endlessly monotonous through his head. Where was Slonda. Why had Grot come through the Tandor portal into the Conclave. Did he have something to do with the fact that his brother had not been present. Did Grot know something no one dared say aloud. Had the Water School stretched out its hands farther than it admitted. And in general, that whole irritating, petty insistence on investigation, questioning, inquisition, that self satisfied relish in binding a man merely because one sensed he might grow larger than the measure they wanted to apply to him. Anadar clenched his teeth more than once when he thought of it. There was more in the world than these ridiculous little farces. More than Hokn’f’s wounded vanity. More than Fontal’s polished courtly cunning. More than the dignified face of an institution that in truth often only wired fear into a beautiful form.

Out of nowhere, Naaarstr spoke.

What is an inquisition.

Anadar lifted his head slightly, as if someone had spoken to him from the side, and Shara looked at him at once but said nothing. He kept his eyes on the road.

An investigation, he answered inwardly. Whether something happened outside the Code. Usually the outcome is decided before the first question is asked.

Naaarstr fell silent for a moment, and when he spoke again there was genuine interest in the voice, not mere play.

And then what happens.

The accused is usually neutralized. A tower. Guarded. Isolated. Exile. Sometimes death.

Only individual persons.

Anadar was about to say yes, to shorten the answer the way one shortens annoying questions when one feels they lead somewhere one does not yet want to go, and yet something held him back. Perhaps it was only the memory of a sentence he had once read, perhaps an old lesson, perhaps simply the Mother’s bright, clear voice in the back of his mind, but he realized the answer was not as simple as it had first sounded. Inquisitions rarely strike only individuals. They strike patterns, deviations, possibilities. Whole groups. Thoughts, if they cannot grasp them otherwise. He did not give the answer.

Instead he changed the subject.

What happened after you killed Frantor.

Naaarstr gave a quiet laugh, more a dry scrape across consciousness than a sound.

I left him behind. Dying.

You did not kill him.

He should be by now. He did not look well the last time I saw him. It became hectic when everyone broke camp and suddenly left.

The flight.

Yes. From one day to the next. Everyone more or less set off, at once, perhaps packed a few things quickly, and were on the road as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I found that interesting.

You said barbarians drove you out.

I lied, Naaarstr said, with an almost childish satisfaction. Yes, of course there was trouble with them now and then, border skirmishes, small raids. Something else drove them.

And you went with.

I was curious. And staying behind alone did not seem right. So I went with. But it was not quite what I had imagined, and after two or three bloodless corpses too many questions were asked. So I moved on. To the Feste.

What was your intent.

Naaarstr gave no clear answer. He did not withhold it completely, but slid around it like water around a stone, and Anadar soon realized that some questions did not receive silence from this being but something more irritating, an evasion disguised as openness.

Intent is a human word, the demon said at last. You always act as if your paths begin with a clean will. Most of the time they begin with hunger. Or curiosity. Or the desire not to remain where you are. Call it what you like.

So Anadar steered around, not quite openly, because he did not want to show the demon too soon where he was heading, but decisively enough to build a picture from the peripheral details.

When you left Sontor, he asked days later as they rode through sodden thaw lands, between swollen streams, grey willows, and fields whose brown stubble lay under a thin, dirty sheet of snow, what did you take with you.

Naaarstr did not answer at once.

Not much. What use is a whole tower when everyone is running.

But you did not leave empty handed.

No one leaves empty once they have learned how much space there is in a pouch, a saddle, under a cloak.

Anadar did not press immediately. He let the question lie as if it mattered less than it did, and in the following hours and the next day he edged closer, sometimes via things Naaarstr had used in the Feste, sometimes via rites, sometimes via objects no summoner would ever leave behind if he still had his wits. In the end what remained for him was an impression, not proof, but a sufficiently sharp sense: the book was most likely still in Sontor. Naaarstr would have treated it differently otherwise. More carefully. More greedily.

The demon, however, knew perfectly well where Anadar’s curiosity was aiming, and perhaps that was what he liked about it.

I could teach you, he said one evening when they had made camp in a half abandoned sheep shelter and rain drummed on the rotten roof while outside the ground was already turning back into wet snow. Not everything. Not at once. But the first things. Summoning. Binding. The things you now know only in half warnings.

And what do you demand in return.

Blood. Knowledge.

That is more than one.

It is never only one.

Anadar rode on long in silence the next morning before answering.

You demand what you always demand.

No, Naaarstr said almost gently. I do not demand killing. That is your pathetic mistake. I need blood. Not necessarily death. You humans like to confuse the two, because your morality only interests you as long as it gets to bleed at comfortable intervals.

Anadar felt something in him recoil at those words, and at the same time something else listen. That was precisely what made the talks with the demon so exhausting. Not that Naaarstr was openly evil. That would have been easier. But that some of what he said could not be dismissed immediately as a lie, because he set his hooks exactly where concept and conscience did not fit cleanly together.

And what do you want to teach for it.

How to call without losing at once. How to bind without tearing. How to set a circle that holds. How to recognize when something lies. How to understand blood as a gate and not only as sacrifice. How to speak old names without having them cling to you at once.

And knowledge, Anadar repeated. What knowledge.

Yours, that you do not merely hoard, but understand. You take from the world. I want a share.

The conversation stayed dark. It did not run as a single exchange through one evening, but through days, through stretches of road, through grey river meadows, past villages they avoided, over bridges that looked older than the roads leading to them. More than once Naaarstr suddenly fell silent for a long time. More than once he pressed only that blood back into Anadar’s awareness, dull, relentless, like a throbbing tooth. And yet the fear that had accompanied him not long ago was no longer the same. Anadar was learning something, without yet wanting to use it. And perhaps that was precisely the first danger.

The landscape tightened, grew more confusing, more torn by watercourses that ran down from the heights, swollen and brown and loud as they shot through the land. One day, it was late morning and the rain had just shifted again into fine, slanting needles, they came to a narrow bridge, old, of dark stone, under which a roaring creek ran, white at the edges, dirty in the depth, full of meltwater and days of rain. On the far side stood three riders.

Anadar saw them first only as muted shapes in the haze, pale outlines against a grey day, then one of them stepped forward and dismounted, and in the same moment he knew who it was.

Grot.

Of course Grot.

He felt everything in him harden instantly, before the man even opened his mouth. Grot was dressed in white like a bad habit, and even in the rain he managed to look groomed in a way that inwardly insulted Anadar. Son and Indra held, as always, a little behind him, but they too dismounted and now stepped onto the bridge with him.

Anadar lifted his hand and signaled the others to slow. Then he himself rode forward until both groups nearly touched in the middle of the bridge and only the railing, the rain, and the roaring water beneath them left room between the words.

“I thought,” Anadar said dryly, “you wanted to wait for us in Tandor.”

Grot stared at him as if the very first sentence were an offense.

“So you can run,” he snapped, “while we deal with the riddles you left behind. Where is your brother. Did he warn you that I am looking for you.”

Anadar blinked once. Then he said with a calm that was half real and half decision, “My brother. I thought he was with you.”

Something in Grot’s face twitched.

“Stop trying to mislead me.”

“Then stop acting as if everyone in this world enjoys spending their time on it.”

Shara was already riding closer to Anadar than before. Morgut kept slightly diagonal behind him. Miene and Sindra were silent, both alert. Son and Indra stood motionless. But Grot stepped forward, and in that step lay so much pent up irritation that Anadar knew at once: the man had achieved too little for too long and now considered Anadar the right place to unload that fact.

“Slonda has disappeared,” Grot said. “For days. We have reason to assume he was in contact with you, that he informed you, or withheld information about you. I am not here to listen any longer to your neatly placed evasions.”

“Then you are stupidly here,” Anadar said.

Grot drew in air the way men do who are still deciding whether they will speak or act, and when he let it out the decision had been made.

“I will detain you here and interrogate you if I must.”

Anadar laughed.

Not loud, not coarse mockery, more like someone who finds something so unpleasantly foolish that it almost gives him relief, because now at least what had been hanging in the air is finally said aloud.

“Really,” he said quietly.

Grot raised his hands.

The air changed at once. The rain around them did not stop, but it no longer obeyed gravity alone. Water became needles, fine glassy points that hung in the air, gathered, and laid themselves around the traveling party like a cold, trembling wreath. Son and Indra did not move. Perhaps they had seen this moment coming. Perhaps they feared it.

Naaarstr spoke instantly.

Blood.

For a heartbeat Anadar was tempted in a way that terrified him precisely because it came so fast: the sword, Grot, the narrow bridge, the creek below, one wrong step and everything could be solved in raw, straight line violence. He felt the pressure, heard the dull greedy whisper in the steel at his side, and knew in the same moment that the next instant would define him in a way that reached farther than this wet day.

He focused.

Briefly.

Hardly.

And instead of the sword he let something else come.

His left arm shot forward, and with the motion a fire whip unfolded from his hand, bright, hot, ordered. Not a wild lash, but a clean, sharply guided strand of flame whose heat instantly vaporized the rain needles around him. Water hissed, steam burst up, and for a moment the bridge was half hidden in white billows. Anadar stepped through, one step at a time toward Grot, fire in his hand and his gaze fixed so firmly on the water mage that even Morgut reflexively tightened his reins.

The sword at his side said, with almost delighted curiosity:

Ah. So that is how you do it.

Grot did not retreat at once, but he went paler. Not from fear alone, more from the sudden understanding that the man in front of him was not merely playing the sharp tongued, unpleasantly superior Conclave participant, but might in this moment truly be willing to break him on this bridge.

“Go back,” Anadar said without taking his eyes off Grot, and he meant his own people.

Shara did not move.

“Shara.”

He said it more quietly this time.

She understood. A moment later she guided her horse slightly back, not far, just enough to give him room. Morgut followed with a muttered complaint. Miene and Sindra as well.

Grot lifted his right hand higher already, likely to set the next spell, when suddenly Son and Indra walked past him.

Not hurried.

Not attacking.

They simply stepped by him, straight toward Anadar, stopped a few paces in front of him, sank to one knee at the same time, and threw back their hoods.

Rain ran over their hair, their brows, their cheeks, and both lowered their eyes.

“Master Anadar,” Son said first, and her voice was clear enough that even the creek below did not swallow it entirely. “Please forgive us.”

Indra raised her head only slightly.

“We need your help.”

The fire whip crackled softly in Anadar’s hand. Behind him even Morgut held his breath. In front of him stood Grot, pale with anger, humiliation, and something else that looked almost like helplessness.

And on the narrow bridge, between winter rain, steam, and the roar of water, Anadar understood that the real story was only just beginning.

Formularbeginn

They rode out of Zoordak, and scarcely had they left the city’s sheltering heights behind when that fine, unpleasantly cold drizzle set in, the kind that did not really want to count as rain and yet seeped into everything, gathering in hair, clinging to eyelashes, darkening leather, an

IV

he Fiery Fortress could breathe again. Not freely yet, not with that full, proud sense of safety that had once defined it, but enough that a stranger looking at the compound from afar would no longer have seen only ruin and burn scars, but work, will, and that peculiar kind of order that is not born of calm, but of discipline. Everywhere people carried, lifted, hammered, braced, stacked, swept, measured, and tore down again when something proved unusable. Walls that only weeks ago had lain blackened and split now stood again to shoulder height. Roofs were covered provisionally. Halls that had first merely been secured were already being used for lessons again, even if with tarpaulins instead of doors, and with smoke venting through openings never meant for it.

Manador walked the Fortress daily, usually early, when the sky was already bright but the day’s true warmth had not yet begun, and he checked everything, not because it would have failed without him, but because he wanted to see it. It was not enough for him to hear reports. He wanted to hear the hammer blows himself, wanted to see whether the boys truly carried with their backs or were tugging with their arms again like stablehands, wanted to know whether the stones were set properly, the timbers well seasoned, the fires tended correctly. A school like this cannot be rebuilt by instructions alone. It is rebuilt by presence. He had always believed that, and the present state proved him right.

The clearing and repair work progressed well. Too well perhaps, if one followed a suspicious mind, because some things ran so smoothly that it almost seemed as though everyone had been waiting for an excuse to behave even more decisively and orderly than before. But Manador was not a suspicious man for the sake of suspicion. He enjoyed it. He enjoyed the sight of young mages hauling stone before running to lessons. He enjoyed that no one tried to slip away, that even those who usually stood out more by clever excuses than by zeal suddenly showed up with sooty hands and raw palms and did more than anyone demanded of them. He enjoyed the order that grew from it, that proud, taut, almost military order that in the Fiery Fortress always emerged most clearly when it had been threatened or wounded.

Of course he knew where part of it came from.

Anadar.

People did not speak his name constantly, not openly at least, certainly not among the senior ranks and not in the teaching halls where form and discipline still mattered, and yet his absent will lay over the school like a second roof. The young ones who knew him only through stories now spoke of him with a mix of reverence and foolish fervor that sometimes amused Manador and sometimes came uncomfortably close to fanaticism. The older ones who had learned with him, argued with him, or ridden with him did not grow chattier, but quieter, more focused, as if they had decided that every sloppy posture in his absence was almost a personal insult. You could see it even in training. Stances were held cleaner. Forms were guided more carefully. No one shuffled into the practice hall anymore. No one thought a halfhearted strike was good enough as long as you could say something clever afterward.

Manador noted this change with a quiet pride he found hard to admit.

He himself had been impressed by Anadar for a long time, though never in the way those younger ones were, who turned admiration immediately into purity and greatness. Manador was not blind. He knew Anadar’s hardness, his pride, his tendency to carry everything alone until it was almost too late. He also knew that power does not only elevate a man, it can narrow him if he is not careful, and that Anadar had reached places by now where others would long since have either broken or rotted. But perhaps the deeper recognition lay precisely there. Manador had never cared for raw strength alone. Strength impresses every second fool. What impressed him was that Anadar, despite everything, was still held by a kind of inner measure, even if that measure kept coming under pressure. And he liked that the school could sense it.

Only sometimes, when he saw with what fervor a few of the youngest already spoke of him, with what shining eyes they turned his decisions, his battles, even his mistakes into legends, Manador thought they would have to be careful. Schools do not suddenly tip into fanaticism. They slide into it, grateful, proud, convinced they are doing what is right. The Fiery Fortress had always been more receptive to that than other places. Fire loves form, but it also loves devotion, and devotion becomes belief faster than clever people like to admit.

Still, he let the zeal run.

He saw no reason to dampen it as long as it translated into work. And it did. Everywhere. In the lower courtyard, where shattered wall crowns were being reset. In the workshops, where nails were pulled, iron re-forged, damaged mounts replaced. In the dormitories, where even those students who usually thought order was for others cleaned their straw beds, shook out blankets, hauled chests, and suddenly took an interest in whether a window draft worsened the night cold or not. The Fortress regained its shape, and with every reclaimed wall, every re-covered roof, every recovered room, the mood also gained firmness.

Lessons had resumed as well, though in a rougher, more immediate way than before. Teaching did not always happen in the designated rooms. Sometimes they stood on rubble fields and practiced posture, breath, and concentration while beams were still being carried behind them. Sometimes they had simple forms of fire-drawing repeated beside open building pits, just so everyone could see how easily an imprecise movement in wind and dry timber could become stupidity. Manador considered that useful. Schools that function only in intact halls do not deserve their walls.

Late one morning, when the sky above the Fortress was glaringly clear and the air smelled of dust, lime, and warm stone, he was called to one of the collapsed towers. It was not one of the large, visible towers of the outer line, but an older structure in the inner area, rather narrow, once likely more archive or observation tower than true fortification, and the attack had hit it badly. The upper third had collapsed, the inner stairwells broken, and so far they had limited themselves to securing the remains so that no one died of curiosity there.

Now, however, while clearing deeper below, they had discovered something.

Manador went himself.

The way down into the cellar was narrow and dusty, because half the access had had to be freed from collapsed masonry. Two older students held torches, a third stood in the passage with a hook pole and a breathing cloth, as if anything might still slide. Below, the air immediately grew cooler, damper, quieter. The tower had a lower chamber that hardly anyone still knew about, a long barrel-vaulted room with low wall niches and half-bricked shelves, and there they lay.

Documents.

Many.

Not loose, not scattered like ordinary rolls rescued in panic, but ordered, bundled, placed in capsules, in flat boxes that still suggested a remnant of system. Some were wrapped in leather, others slid into thin metal sleeves, still others tied with bands bearing seals, old, but unbroken. Dust lay over them, lime as well, and some of the outer containers had drawn damp, yet most looked untouched enough that even at first glance it was clear how unusual this find was.

Manador knelt beside one of the boxes and ran his thumb over the seal.

He knew the practice.

It was not rare, at least not among serious mages. Everything that was not merely teaching material, but experiment, transitional form, dangerous innovation, or an incompletely understood spell, was sealed. Not because one loved secrecy as outsiders often claimed, but because spells are not only read, they can be triggered, and this kind of accident often begins where a stupid or overeager student believes a half-understood ritual is, at heart, merely a more difficult version of a lesson. In that sense, the custom itself was not remarkable.

Remarkable was the quantity.

“How much of this,” he asked softly, “have you found.”

The student with the torch visibly swallowed.

“So far only this chamber, Master. Beyond it there seems to be more, but the passage is partly buried. We did not want to move anything before you saw it.”

Manador nodded. That was right. The bundles lay too close together, too deliberately set, too unlike mere storage remnants. More like something placed deep and quiet on purpose, so it would not be forgotten, but also not casually found.

He picked up one of the packages and weighed it in his hand. Heavier than parchment alone, perhaps with inset metal plates or protective layers. The seal itself showed no personal mark, only an old form that spoke more of internal custody than ownership.

“Has anyone tried to open anything.”

Three heads shook at once.

“No, Master.”

“Good.”

He moved deeper into the chamber, had the torch raised higher, and looked along the rows. The niches were fuller than he liked. One could suspect whole decades of experimental work here, or what remained of it after several generations. Part of him instantly wanted to drop everything, fetch a table, inspect the oldest seals, compare hands, reconstruct lines of origin, check the catalogs for who last used this tower and when knowledge of it had been lost. Precisely because he knew the Fiery Fortress, he knew that here one had either found a treasure or a bundle of old stupidity, and both could be extraordinarily revealing in the right hands.

But he considered it only briefly.

Then he stood.

“It will be locked,” he said. “Immediately. No one goes down here without my explicit permission. The door will be secured above and below. Two guards in rotation. No curious fingers. No half guesses. No accidental heroics.”

“Yes, Master.”

“And no one speaks of it as if we have discovered a miracle. We have discovered old, sealed documents. That is all. The Fortress is still half open to the sky, and I will not spend my time on whether some sixteen-year-old believes forbidden signs can speed the rebuilding.”

That drew a few nervous, short laughs, just enough to loosen the tension in the boys’ shoulders.

Manador stood a moment longer, looked once more into the chamber, and felt the discovery settle into the background of his thinking, not urgent enough to displace everything else at once, but with that stubbornness good finds possess. Something old lay there. Something significant, perhaps. Perhaps merely dangerous, perhaps merely unpleasant in its uselessness, but certainly not trivial. And precisely for that reason it had to wait.

For now they had better things to do.

When he stepped back into the light, the brightness of the courtyard blinded him for a moment. Everywhere the Fortress kept working. A group of young mages carried freshly hewn stones. Two masters argued about the angle of a newly set stair line. From the forge came the hard, clean ringing of metal. Somewhere an instructor called a name and received a far too late “Yes, Master” in return. Order. Work. Rebuilding. The school’s present life.

Manador took a deep breath.

Then he moved on. He wanted to see how far they were with the southern wall, whether the new roofline of the eastern wing held, and whether the youngest were already starting to turn enthusiasm into sloppiness again in training. Behind him the cellar doors were closed.

Below, the seals waited.

Above, the Fortress lived.

V

The ride to Tandor was long and cold and wet, and perhaps that was exactly what made it bearable, because when the weather is bad enough, when rain and a hard wind press people deep into their cloaks, when roads become grey ribbons and even a glance left or right finds little more than soaked fields, brown slopes, swollen streams, and that dull distance where all outlines bleed into one another, then even people who normally have to comment on everything fall silent more often, and certain things that in clear air would have turned into arguments at once simply sink into the damp and stay there.

Grot rode at the head of the group, as if the position belonged to him by nature, immaculate even in the rain, immaculate in that peculiarly upright way Anadar had always disliked because it felt less like dignity and more like constant self inspection. Son and Indra stayed close to him at first, but over the course of the first day they kept breaking out of that rigid formation, riding back, then forward again, reporting what was known on the Islands of Wind, what people suspected, and what they preferred not to say out loud as long as no one could prove it. A sea beast was roaming the West Sea, and not merely as rumour, not merely as a scare story by which merchants raised their prices and coastal towns brought their children home earlier, but as something tangible, as a danger that rammed ships, threatened shorelines, and had already disrupted sea traffic so severely that the first cargoes were being rerouted by wagon and cart, slow, expensive, and unpleasant for everyone involved.

Anadar and Shara rode toward the back of the group, close enough not to fall behind, far enough to leave Grot the front like a dog that stays calm only if you let it keep the illusion that it leads the pack. Morgut drifted back now and then, muttered a few sentences, received a short reply from Anadar or Shara, and then moved forward again, usually whenever Grot creaked too loudly in the saddle or wiped the rain from his face with a disdainful gesture, as if he had personally decided the weather was insulting. Miene and Siendra held a middle position, not entirely with the water mages, not entirely with Shara, and from a distance the group might have looked like eight riders taking the same road while travelling through three or four different realities.

Over the following days the landscape narrowed, grew wetter, more chopped up, full of brown, swollen runoffs chewing through the land as if they wanted to reclaim the roads themselves. When they reached a bridge and found Grot already waiting there, enough irritation had built up in Anadar that he no longer needed much effort to dislike him. What happened on that bridge, the threats, the rain sharpening into needles, the fire whip, Son and Indra on their knees, changed the rest of the journey. The lines were clearer afterward, but no friendlier. Grot continued to ride ahead, stiffer than before, immaculate in his humiliation, immaculate in his silence, and even Morgut held back his usual barbed commentary for half a day, out of a mix of curiosity and the genuine wish to see how long a man like Grot could stay quiet after two of his own had bypassed him in front of everyone.

Son and Indra tried to tell the story as far as they knew it. The fight against a renegade mage, the explosion of a tower. The Islands of Wind had been harried for weeks by something that rose from the sea, smashed ships, dared landings, and could neither be bound nor wounded, only driven off for a time by a particular sound or a combination of tones. It was now attacking not only merchant vessels but disrupting supplies and forcing more and more goods onto the land routes. That this derailed their plans was obvious. Anadar had wanted Tandor to find Slonda, or at least his trail, and then continue via Flund to Sontor to search for answers to the old flight or discover new questions. Now a new monster, a new route, a new delay stood between them and that intent, a diversion large enough that it could no longer be called a diversion.

Shara and Anadar argued about it for a long time, mostly while riding and in those quiet evening stretches when a fire burned but no one had the energy for big speeches. Should they seek Slonda first, whatever it cost. Should they split after that. Should part of them ride west while the others went north. Every model had its flaw, and every flaw smelled more like loss than wisdom right now.

“Maybe we should split up,” Shara said once, quietly, when they were sitting by a weak fire under a stone overhang, able to hear the rain just beyond the edge, while Morgut argued with Son about sea charts neither of them actually had.

Anadar stared into the embers for a long time before he shook his head.

“No. Or not yet. Slonda first. If he’s alive, he’ll offer more than speculation. And if we split before we know anything, we might just double the stupidity.”

Naaarstr intruded into these conversations now and then with its cool, factual remarks.

“Another demon,” Anadar asked once, when the talk returned to the sea beast. “Can you imagine someone accidentally calling up something else.”

“I would not rule it out,” Naaarstr replied. “But it does not sound familiar to me. Water is not exactly the element in which my kind first feels at home. Fire, rather. Depth. Heat. Altars. Not spray. Not salt. Not wet wood. But exclude it, no, I will not. You humans are remarkably inventive at unleashing things that do not suit you.”

When they finally rode into Tandor through the rain, all of them were exhausted, soaked, irritable, and drained in that quiet way too many grey days create. The city received them the way Tandor received most things, calm, heavy, with that old, stone patience that belonged to it, and at the gate they were met by Tranda and Isidre. Tranda’s face, even before the first formalities were finished, showed that the news would not be good.

Slonda had not surfaced.

Still not.

He had left no message, no official notice, no sign that he intended to leave Tandor. Tranda said it without ornament, and the plainness made it worse. Isidre stood beside him, red hair half hidden under a dark hood, and her expression had that rare look of a clever person who is both angry and genuinely worried.

What followed was back and forth. Grot wanted culprits at once, wanted connections, wanted to hear that Slonda had deceived them or that Anadar had withheld something. Tranda grew sharper than Anadar had ever seen him and told him that his presence so far had not produced a single useful answer. Isidre began speaking with Miene and Siendra to reconstruct the days. Son and Indra were questioned by her and later by Shara about the monster, the islands, and the shifting traffic on the West Sea. Morgut could not stand the upper halls for more than an hour before he followed Anadar into the library.

They searched Slonda’s rooms and the areas where he had last worked. Anadar sat over his brother’s notes, over too many scrolls, sheets, margins, half readable indices, chalk rubbings, small sketches of shelves, signs whose meaning escaped him, and pages where Slonda’s hand had become so fast you were looking less at writing than at the trace of thought. Some rolls were empty. Some held only a few words. Some looked handled and worn at the edges, as if they had been opened repeatedly in the last days. Some he could read, but little helped. Everything was confused, scattered, like the material of a man chasing three thoughts at once and finishing none of them properly.

Meanwhile even Tandor received the news from the West Sea. Merchants, wagon drivers, messengers. Sea traffic was slowing, some routes nearly still, coastal villages anxious, more transports moving in long caravans over land. The water mages pressed. It showed in Son and Indra the longer they stayed, not because they did not respect Tandor, but because every hour here might be one too many for their school and their islands.

Grot remained Grot.

He disrupted everything and suspected everyone of trying to mislead him, and soon Anadar had the absurd impression the man would interrogate the walls themselves if he thought he could wring a statement out of stone.

Between the shelves, in the catacombs of the library, where Morgut finally accompanied him, Anadar spoke again with Naaarstr about whether what had happened in Tandor, this vanishing, this peculiar emptiness, might be related to similar forces, to the same dark category as the attack they themselves had suffered.

“This has nothing to do with me,” the demon said. “I was never here. And an interference of that kind, if interference it is, is not how I operate. Stop forcing everything into a single causal chain just because your mind enjoys pressing disorder into pattern. Perhaps you should begin to see the events as separate, instead of binding them together by compulsion.”

It irritated Anadar precisely because Naaarstr might be right.

At some point, in one of those long, silent hours between searching, questioning, and restless frustration, Tranda mentioned, almost in passing, that the Dreikrone would occur again in a few weeks, that rare night when all three moons were full. It came only about every ten years, he said, and the water along the coasts stood noticeably higher then. This time, however, would be special, because Jonsus would also be visible in the sky. Such a configuration, Dreikrone under Jonsus, had not been observed for a very long time.

Morgut grinned at once and said that sounded exactly like the kind of sky under which sensible people stayed indoors and unreasonable mages rode out to pick a fight with fate and hunt sea monsters. Even Tranda had to smile at that, briefly.

The real clue came later.

Anadar remembered suddenly that he and Slonda had once often sent messages via mirrors, back when letters were too slow or too easy to intercept. So he went again to Slonda’s quarters, searched for the mirror, finally found it between two unremarkable boxes, almost carelessly placed, and held it for a long time before he sat down and gathered the focus such things required. At first there was only his own reflection, tired, narrower in the face than months before, with the shadow under the eyes that did not come only from weather. Then, however, the surface shifted, not in a way anyone would notice at a glance, but in that subtle manner that tells you an object is waiting to answer.

And there it was.

Find me where the library begins.

Anadar stared at it for a long time.

It was exactly the kind of message Slonda would have considered fully sufficient, because he himself knew very well what he meant, and the rest of the world, in his view, could do a little more work.

Where does the library begin.

On the ground floor. In the cellar. At the first catalogue. The oldest shelf. The first roll. The idea of a library. It was infuriatingly Slonda.

Anadar walked it for days. With Morgut, once with Shara, once alone. Entrances, antechambers, catacombs, storage corridors, the earliest rooms, the oldest registers, the lower archives, the first documented holdings, the first physical space that had provably been the library. Nothing. Or at least nothing that could be read as the clear continuation of the message.

In the end he had to admit it made no sense to gnaw on that single sentence until everything else stood still.

So they conferred, all of them together.

North. West. Splitting. But splitting made little sense now, not without Slonda, not with the monster, not with Grot, not with so many half pieces in hand and twice as many gaps. So for the moment the west became the option. If they could find the creature or at least understand it, perhaps not only one problem would end there, but a path might open that would later carry them north again.

And so they rode out in the rain toward the Great Market, with Isidre now joining them as well.

The road was wet and by now muddy, the sky a flat grey, and at some point, when they had been riding in that dull silence wet riders impose on each other, Anadar looked over at Grot and said, with perfect seriousness:

“Remarkable that a water mage of your rank cannot even manage to stop the rain.”

For one heartbeat no one was sure he had really said it.

Then Morgut laughed first.

Miene snorted so indecently she nearly choked. Siendra turned her head away to hide her smile, and even Son lowered her gaze for a moment, as if the line were too good to ignore completely. Only Grot remained dry.

“If I could order the world according to my will,” he said without turning, “I would begin elsewhere.”

“I believe that immediately,” Anadar muttered.

And for a few steps, even the rain felt less unpleasant.

End Part I