Anadar III/II

VI

In Ashambrat the day began the way so many days in the desert began, with a coolness that the stones still held from the night, with a pale first light on walls and towers, with courtyards that for a few breaths were so still it seemed the city still belonged to shadow and not yet again to people, and yet on this morning, very early, it was clear that something was already in motion, not outside the gates, not in the sand or between the caravans, but in the rooms of the Wind School itself, where masters and older students were already on the move, servants carried water, set bowls on low tables, and from the upper windows of those round chambers of council, thin banners of herbal smoke drifted upward before sunrise.

Hokn’f was angry.

He was already seated when the others entered, upright, narrow, his hands set on the arms of his chair, and although he held himself in that controlled form of which he was proud, an irritation came off him that everyone in the room felt long before the first word was spoken. Roto took his place as always a little to Hokn’f’s right, quieter, heavier in build, with the enduring calm one finds in men who do not voice their opinion quickly but hate to change it once it is made. Kolnidranooora sat to the left, folding his long fingers together, almost cheerful at first glance, and yet Gnok, who entered later and more slowly, saw at once that behind that smooth brow and that polite, nearly drowsy gaze someone was already calculating.

Besides them, other masters of the Wind School were present, two women from the southern gardens, an old star watcher with a face like dried leather, a man from the upper caravan halls who smelled more of dust and camel tack than of doctrine, and Gnok himself, who among them possessed one particular quality, namely that he was no longer young enough to be impressed by another man’s anger.

Before everyone had properly settled, Hokn’f spoke.

“Neutral,” he said, and the word in his mouth already sounded like an accusation against language itself. “Neutral. The Water School abstains on a question that, by all we have seen and heard, should not allow abstention, and no one there seems to grasp what kind of signal that sends.”

“They will have reasons,” Gnok said calmly, before anyone else could cut in, and took his place with that unhurried care as though even the way an old man sits is a form of contradiction against needless speed.

Hokn’f turned his head only slightly, but in that small movement there was enough irritation to have silenced anyone younger.

“Reasons,” he said. “Of course. One always has reasons when one lacks the courage to choose a side.”

“Or when one has more information than you allow them,” Gnok replied.

“No one in this room,” Hokn’f said now more sharply, “needs to be made a fool of by the Water School, Gnok. First they present themselves as neutral, then they expect everyone else to take that cowardice for wisdom.”

“Or for caution,” the old star watcher said dryly.

“Caution is only the dignified word for delay, when one does not want to act.”

Gnok lifted the bowl of hot infusion, smelled it, took a small sip, and then said, as though he were speaking more to the air than to the master of the Wind School, “And anger is often only the fast word for being slighted.”

That landed.

Roto shot him a brief sideways glance. Kolnidranooora lowered his head so that no one could have said whether he was hiding a smile or only sinking deeper into thought. Hokn’f, however, let the remark stand for a moment, not because it had convinced him, but because he knew any reaction too quick to Gnok would make him look smaller than the old man, and that was something he could tolerate even less than political neutrality.

“It is not about being slighted,” he said at last, quieter now, which in his case was almost more dangerous than volume. “It is about order. If the Water School begins to withdraw from joint decisions, while at the same time ships vanish in the west and along the coasts rumours of monsters run, if Tandor cannot find its own master and the Fiery Fortress shelters a man who has passed through six schools, then we no longer have the right to comfort. Then sides must be chosen.”

“Or first, facts,” Gnok said.

No one answered at once. It was hard to argue with Gnok, precisely because he never treated it as argument. He did not throw sharp words, never raised his voice, he spoke with the patience of someone who has lived long enough to know how often proud men commit the same mistake in the end and then call it character.

For a while the discussion shifted to the refugee question. From the north, said the master of the caravan halls, people were still being pushed southward, not in masses that would have flooded a city like Ashambrat at once, but in a steady, growing number, families, lone riders, smaller groups, thinned out trains that carried winter in their cloaks and in their faces. They had not come all the way into the deep south, the road was too long, too hard, too expensive, and the desert itself remained for many still more frightening than any bad news from home. But you could see the movement. It ran through the larger places like pressure, pushed supplies apart, drove up prices of things that had never been cheap, and tightened the relations between cities that had never been entirely calm.

Now the reports from the West Sea were added. Merchants said transports were increasingly going overland, that coastal ports had begun to hesitate, that some stretches at sea were considered unreliable, not officially closed, but more often avoided. You did not need to believe every rumour to see there would be consequences.

“And soon it is Dreikrone,” the star watcher said, drawing a bony finger along the table’s edge as though sketching lines only he could see. “You cannot separate coastal water levels from political matters, even if you would like to. When Tro, Usda, and Vru are all full, the sea rises. It always does. And this time Jonsus will stand in the sky. It will be a different night.”

“You sound as if you believe in omens,” Hokn’f said.

“I believe in recurring conditions,” the old man replied. “Others call it an omen when they are too comfortable to study the sky.”

Again that brief silence in which several at once considered whether to engage or pretend nothing had been said.

In the end it was Kolnidranooora who brought the discussion back to what Hokn’f truly cared about.

“We must draw the Water School back to our side,” he said softly, almost casually, and precisely because of that everyone listened. “Not by accusing them of having been neutral. That would only breed defiance. But by helping them remember that in certain situations neutrality is nothing but the more comfortable form of a mistake.”

“In other words,” Roto said, “we send someone.”

“Someone,” Hokn’f murmured, “or several.”

They spoke first of Gontar. Of Fontal. Of the School of Life and its networks, which often heard more than they openly admitted and could set more in motion than they would ever call influence. If the Water School was to be brought back into a common posture, it might be wise to involve Fontal first, to bind him into the process before he once again positioned himself as an independent mediator. And if they then travelled together to the Islands of Wind, not only could more pressure be applied, but it could also be prevented that the Water School settled the matter quietly among themselves.

“And then Tandor,” Hokn’f said. “If Slonda is missing, then Tranda is more vulnerable. He will not like it if one calls it that, but he is. A man whose master vanishes is more receptive to order than he ever would be in undisturbed self assurance.”

“Or he is insulted and goes in the opposite direction out of principle,” Gnok said.

“Then he is a fool.”

“That has never been an argument against action,” Gnok murmured.

Hokn’f heard it and, this time, ignored it.

“This Anadar,” he said, and the way he spoke the name made clear he meant far more than a person, “must be put into someone’s hands. Not necessarily by force, if there is another way, but he must not keep moving through the world like a man who knows no measure anymore and then expect the rest of order to stand still and admire him.”

“Admiration is, at the moment, rather the business of the Fiery Fortress,” the master from the caravan halls said dryly.

“Exactly,” Hokn’f snapped. “And that is precisely what will grow into bigger problems later.”

At this point Roto and Kolnidranooora, almost without looking at each other, began to steer Hokn’f away from the thought of going himself. The master of the Wind School had not offered openly yet, but everyone in the room knew he was considering it, and precisely because he had not said it aloud yet, it was necessary to stop it now, before pride turned into decision.

“You cannot ride yourself,” Roto said, plain enough that it did not sound like intrigue. “Not now.”

Hokn’f lifted his head at once.

“And why exactly not.”

“Because you are too important here,” Kolnidranooora said, before Roto even needed to continue. “The refugee question remains. Dreikrone is coming. The southern caravans must be reordered if sea trade continues to shift. And if you travel yourself now, you give all of this the appearance of a personal hunt. That does not help us.”

“Perhaps it does,” Hokn’f said.

“No,” Roto said.

It was so calm it was almost like a stone dropped into a fast stream.

Kolnidranooora inclined his head. “Let us go. The two of us. We pick up Fontal, speak with him in Gontar, travel together to the Islands of Wind and see how far the Water School can still remember shared interests. And if necessary, we go on to Tandor afterward.”

Hokn’f was silent for a long time. He did not like being held back, and he liked it even less when the counsel was sensible. Gnok watched him over the rim of his bowl and finally said, not without gentleness, “A master does not always prove his importance by riding himself. Sometimes he proves it by knowing whom he must send.”

Hokn’f did not like it, because it came from Gnok. But he liked that the sentence at least offered him a kind of greatness that did not depend on a saddle.

So at last he nodded.

“Fine. You two ride.”

Roto only dipped his head. Kolnidranooora smiled so faintly it could almost have been a trick of light.

“Before Dreikrone,” Hokn’f said. “I want you in Gontar before Dreikrone. If you find a ship that takes you part of the way, use it. If not, ride. But I do not want to hear excuses when Tro, Usda, and Vru stand full in the sky.”

“You only hear excuses if someone wants to bring them to you,” Roto said.

“Then bring me results.”

The meeting dissolved slowly, into small groups, into lingering fragments of conversation, into the soft rustle of robes, cups, and sandals over stone, and when Roto and Kolnidranooora later left the city, they did not ride in triumph but with the focused haste that takes men who know counsel has now become road. Ashambrat lay warm and bright behind them, the towers pale in the light of the rising morning, and ahead of them lay first the road, then perhaps the coast, perhaps a harbour, perhaps a ship, if they found one. Both were already thinking in distances, in days, in wind directions, and in the question of whether the sea could still be used in time before Dreikrone pulled it too much toward itself.

Far outside the city, where the dunes rose higher and emptier again and the gaze slid across sand and light, at that same hour several riders of the Sondra sat on a distant ridge.

They sat on their mounts as though cut out of the morning, fully veiled, armed, motionless, and yet filled with a watchfulness that was visible even at this distance. Behind them the sun had just climbed over the flatter lines of the desert, and its light struck cloth, leather, and metal unevenly, so that for a moment everything looked sharper than the world beneath it. They spoke in that singing language Gudi had heard, soft on the surface, full of vowels and quiet arcs, and anyone who did not understand might have thought they spoke of something light. In truth, none of their voices was light.

“This harvest is decisive,” the leader said at last, and even in her posture it was clear that no contradiction would be offered casually. “The preparations are made. Everything is ready. Only Dreikrone is missing.”

A younger rider to her right nodded. “The moon drops will not last much longer.”

“They would hardly have lasted until now even last time, if we had distributed them more strictly,” another voice replied. “The last harvest was too meagre. We dragged ourselves through ten years. We cannot afford that again.”

They spoke of moon drops not like goods, but like something that reached deeper into their very existence, and indeed that weight lay beneath their concern. The ancient gardens beneath the city held the place where they could be harvested, far down, protected, sealed, truly abundant only on that rare night when the three moons stood together. Everything was prepared for it, the paths, the tools, the bowls, the retreats, the watch posts, only the alignment of the heavens was still missing. And if the harvest failed again, or was disturbed, it would not merely be unpleasant, it would be fatal.

“We should not ride into the city so often,” one of the men said with a sharp, almost angry undertone. “Every time we do, the chance of being seen increases.”

“We were seen,” a woman on the other side said dryly. “The girl followed us. Perhaps she did not see everything. But enough to become curious.”

“She cannot operate the mechanism.”

“No one but us can,” another said. “Not even by accident. It is sealed by magic. Even if someone pressed the stones, they would find only stone.”

The leader was silent for a moment, and precisely that silence made the others calmer. When she spoke again, she did so without sharpness, but with a finality that suited even the desert itself.

“Too important,” she said. “Even the smallest chance the harvest is disturbed is a fatal chance. If we fail, we will not pay merely with poor yield, but with years.”

“Then we kill her,” the younger one said.

It came so simply, so dryly, as though it were a practical decision.

“That would be clean,” someone else said.

“And conspicuous,” the woman to the leader’s left replied. “Too conspicuous. A dead girl in the city. Then people ask. Then people search. Then they look more closely. Do you want that.”

“Then we watch her constantly.”

“With whom,” the same voice asked. “And for how long. For weeks. Visible. Right in front of the gardens. That is not a solution, that is only a slower form of the same stupidity.”

The discussion turned in circles, killing, observing, frightening, relocating, luring, each option with its own risk, and the longer they spoke, the clearer it became that none of them wanted to carry the responsibility should it fail.

At last the leader raised her hand.

At once they fell silent.

“Two of you come with me into the city,” she said. “Not to speak. To see. To test how much this girl truly knows and whether she is alone in her curiosity. The rest return to the watch posts. No gaps. No carelessness. No second last time.”

She named two names. Those chosen only nodded.

“And if she knows more than she should,” the younger rider asked, the one who had been quickest to speak of killing.

The leader looked down at the distant city, whose towers in the early light seemed almost soft, and her voice was suddenly so quiet the others leaned in a fraction.

“Then we decide again. But not out of impatience. Not out of fear. And not while the harvest still lies ahead of us.”

She drew the reins. Under her the mount snorted, lean, enduring, barely larger than she needed, and in the distance above the ancient gardens the city lay there again, beautifully oblivious, with a secret beneath it more important than any the city’s inhabitants told themselves.

VII

The ride to the Great Market dragged on, yet the deeper they moved into the region, the road lost at least part of its wintry hostility. The cold did not disappear, but it dulled, it became less biting. The wind lost that cutting sharpness that can work through even a good cloak down to the bone. And although the ground under the hooves was still heavy, dark, and saturated with water, the rain gradually stopped. What remained was that stubborn, ubiquitous grey of mud that both widens roads and makes them impassable, that lets wagon wheels sink to the hub and sours even a good horse’s temper. After the last days they almost experienced it as an improvement.

They could now find shelter in inns more often. Not in all of them, because the roads were still full of people, traders, wagoners, small family groups, men with pack animals, women with children, solitary riders whose silence alone betrayed that they were not travelling for pleasure. But the streams of refugees had spread out more evenly, ran broader, less in sudden surges, and so almost every second evening there was, after all, a roof under which one could sit, eat, and watch the steam rise from wet clothing in the room, instead of crouching in the dark under some crooked lean to.

Isidre proved, along the way, to be a wonderful travelling companion.

At first Anadar had not given it much thought when she joined them, more out of necessity than joy, but after the first two days he understood how pleasant a presence could be that neither grabbed for attention nor hid behind polite silence. Isidre was intelligent without turning it into a pose, eloquent without making things needlessly complicated, and she had that quiet kindness that does not exhaust itself in sugary warmth but simply does exactly the right thing at the right moment. She took care of the horses a great deal, was the first to notice when one hoof was warmer than another, when a strap rubbed, when an animal needed to drink more, or when one of the packhorses was loaded too heavily. She also registered the group’s smaller injuries almost in passing, a chafed wrist, an inflamed fingertip, a sore spot at the knee. None of it escaped her, and she treated it with a calm that made no one feel diminished. She got on especially well with Shara. The two often rode alongside each other for a while, spoke softly, and once even laughed so openly that Morgut turned half around in the saddle, just to make sure he had truly heard that sound.

Anadar himself spoke a lot with Son and Indra.

Not openly, not constantly in the group, certainly not within Grot’s earshot, but often enough that bit by bit he could form a sharper picture of what awaited them in the west. Anadar kept asking Son and Indra the same things, changing the order, the tone, or the timing, as if truth were an animal one only had to tire out until it could be caught. Soon he realised the two water mages were not saying everything. Not all at once, not by a single sentence, but gradually, through small shifts, through pauses, through what Son and Indra sometimes did not even look at in one another when a subject came too close to something they did not want to say. Then they rode closer to Grot again, who repeatedly interfered in an annoyingly timely way and saved the two from Anadar’s drilling questions. Anadar was dealing with Naaarstr at the back of his mind, with his own questions, and with the riding. He had the ability not to read thoughts directly but to sense their direction and test them for coherence, yet it became clear to him that even he had limits here. Son and Indra shielded themselves well. Not completely, but enough to make it obvious their restraint was not accidental. And he could not concentrate on conversation, riding, Naaarstr, and mind probing all at once. So he began to develop a plan and shared it with Miene, Sindra, and Morgut, whose help he needed.

Morgut took Grot on. He feigned admiration with such brazen cheek that it was almost art again. He rode beside him once, asked questions about the Water School, about currents, about islands, about bindings, about everything that made a man like Grot believe that at last someone sat before him who still knew how to appreciate the proper value of knowledge and rank. At first Grot responded with mistrust, then with that upright, cold readiness to explain oneself that people sometimes develop when their vanity is stroked in exactly the right place. In this way Morgut bought them time, enough time that Anadar, Miene, and Sindra could drop back with Son and Indra until Grot and Morgut were out of direct earshot.

There they finally stopped.

Not long, only at a more windless edge between road and bare scrub, where the horses steamed and the mud quietly sucked under their hooves. Son and Indra exchanged a look so tired it seemed they had seen this point in the road coming the whole time.

“We know what you’re doing,” Son said at last and sighed. “Or trying to do. You want the truth, and you can tell we aren’t telling the whole truth.”

Miene did not answer at once, but Anadar could see from her face that Son was right.

Indra continued, more directly this time. “We didn’t want this to become a case for an Inquisition. Not because we want to protect crimes, but because we ourselves don’t know what truly happened there. One of us may have done something that violated the Code. Maybe not. Maybe it was only stupidity that got too close to forbidden things. That alone is enough to ruin everything.”

Anadar asked, calmly, “Who.”

Son pushed back the wet hair that had slipped loose under her hood. “Master Xoiun. He lived withdrawn on a small island, far enough from the larger anchorages that one could easily leave him alone. He had always been strange, and with the years he became stranger still. He took in two students, twins, Tring and Tiang. No one really knew why those two of all people. He taught them himself, almost entirely secluded.”

“And what was he experimenting with?” Anadar asked.

“With sea creatures,” Indra said. “Especially those from the deep. Not the usual things, no fishermen’s lore, no coastal magic. Deeper. Stranger. Things you do not bring to the surface alive if you have your wits about you.”

Now they told more, and as they spoke, Miene and Sindra checked them in their own way, not with words, but with that silent, inward attention that shows on their faces only as a slight sharpening of wakefulness. Son and Indra were not lying.

Xoiun’s island had gradually changed, they said. At first only in small ways, wrong smelling mists in the morning, a strange glow in the water, dark masses beneath the surface that surfaced for breaths and vanished again, as if something belonged there that did not belong. Then night songs were heard, not from people on land, but from farther out, where no one should have been singing. Some reported that around the tower they had seen things in moonlight that looked like half forms, too large for fish, too soft for wood, too alive for driftwood. One night, from afar, they saw light lash out from the tower, greenish, then blue, and above it birds circling fell dead into the water.

“They wanted to look into it,” Son said. “Not immediately with violence. First with questions. Then with more questions. Xoiun evaded. He became irritable. We had the impression he wasn’t only hiding something, he barely noticed anymore how much he was hiding it.”

“And then,” Indra said, swallowing once as if she had to force the rest properly into words, “then everything went fast. They wanted to visit him. There was an argument. Then an attack. We defended ourselves. The tower burned. Not roaring from the start, but quickly. And suddenly that creature was there.”

“Xoiun himself?” Anadar asked.

“We don’t know,” Son said. “Either it was Xoiun. Or he brought it up from the deep. Or he cleared a path for it. More than that we can’t say.”

“And the twins.”

Indra answered immediately. “They sang. That’s the strangest thing. Everything was burning, people were screaming, the tower was already partly collapsing, and those two just stood there and sang. Not a song we knew, nothing from the schools, nothing from liturgy, nothing from old coastal chants. Something else. And the monster reacted. It retreated. It calmed, if you can call it that. Then Tring and Tiang disappeared. Simply gone. No trace. No bodies. No escape boats. Nothing.”

“Only the records,” Son said.

“What records.”

“About the songs,” Indra said. “Fragments, notations, sequences of symbols, hints, nothing complete. But enough that we understood: the singing is the only thing that helps. It doesn’t kill the creature. It doesn’t bind it for good. But it can drive it back or calm it. That is the story we know. No more.”

Miene exhaled slowly. “They aren’t lying.”

Sindra nodded. “And they’re not holding back anything they themselves know.”

It gave them no solution, but at least a firmer shape of uncertainty. After that they rode on more slowly and discussed strategy: whether a crossing would be possible without exposing themselves blindly to the creature; whether they had to study the records first; whether Xoiun should be considered the monster or merely its door opener; how one defeats a being that seemed all but immune to ordinary magic.

“Then we start with what works,” Anadar said at last. “Not with what we wish would work. The records. The songs. If Morgut reads them, he’ll understand faster than the rest of us.”

Morgut, who had caught up again and was still pretending that Grot fascinated him immensely, turned his head. “I heard that.”

“Yes,” Anadar said.

“So you’re taking me for a scholar.”

“No. Just a man with an unexpected knack for things other people miss.”

Morgut twisted his mouth. “Is that your version of praise?”

That evening they were in an inn again, this time with separate rooms, because the road carried enough travellers that even mediocre inns suddenly felt important. Anadar ate late, spoke little, and then withdrew to his room. It was small: a bed, a stool, a water jug, and a single lamp whose light made the walls yellow and unreliable. Outside he could hear voices in the yard, a door slamming, hoof sounds, once Morgut’s laughter, duller than usual through wood and stone.

Anadar sat down in front of the bed, cross legged.

He laid the sword across his knees.

He sat motionless for a while, only breathing, until the noise outside sank to the edge of his awareness. Then he took the knife, drew the blade across his own palm, and cut deep enough that blood came at once, dark in the lamplight, warm on his skin. He held his hand over the sword and let the drops fall onto the steel.

The blade drank.

Not visibly to a stranger, perhaps, but to him it was tangible, as though something did not merely accept the offering, but straightened beneath it.

Good, the voice said.

It was immediately clearer than by day, deeper, more awake, almost satisfied.

Then let us begin.

VIII

The construction of the ship kept moving forward.

Not quickly, not in a way that made hope easy, but steadily enough that even the men who, in the first days, had shaken their heads at every new task eventually stopped explaining why each job was impossible. For Kral, that was often the first real sign of progress. Not when hands grew more skilful, not when a hull regained its shape, but when men stopped confusing their own exhaustion with judgement.

They worked from sunrise into the slanted light of afternoon, sometimes longer, when something was in motion that you did not want to leave half done. The wreck still lay canted on the beach, suspended between ship and timber, between hope and remembrance, but by now it was easier to see what it had once been and what, perhaps soon, it could be again. The great wound at the stern, that broken and torn section that had seemed to steal the ship’s future at first sight, remained the worst problem. It did not merely need patching. It needed to be rethought, re framed, re supported. The carpenters and seasoned sailors pried planks from less damaged sections, replaced what had split, reinforced beams, and with ropes and levers forced a form back into place that the sea had almost torn apart.

When they found the trunk that could serve as a usable mast, it was almost a holiday, even if no one spoke the word.

It stood further inland, not deep in the darkest jungle, but far enough that reaching it cost work. Tall, straight, older than most trees in that area, with a growth that immediately changed the way the carpenters spoke about wood. A man who usually found fault with everything ran his hand over the bark and said only that you could make a mast from this trunk, if the world had a little mercy left. So they felled it. Slowly, with wedges, axes, levers, with curses and wet backs. Even bringing it down was labour, where one mistake could split the trunk or send it falling the wrong way, and afterward it had to be stripped of branches, roughly smoothed, and dragged toward the shore with ropes, pulleys, and sheer muscle. It took time. Everything took time. But on the evening of the third day the trunk lay where Kral could see it, and for the first time in a long while he felt he was not merely managing a ruin, but moving toward something again.

Over the weeks, the island proved less barren than it had first seemed.

At first it was only fruit, shellfish, fish, then later they discovered the chickens.

They were not wild birds in the way gulls or shore runners are wild, but real chickens, quarrelsome, alert, perhaps half feral, yet clearly from an origin closer to human hands than to nature’s whim. They ran in a hollow behind the second fresh water run, scratched beneath ferns, fluttered up in alarm onto low branches, and did exactly what hungry men saw in them at once.

Meat.

When the first three were caught and one sailor was already loudly calculating the best way to pluck them, skewer them, and turn them over the fire, Kral intervened. Not with a long speech, not with any pleading reason, but with that clipped sharpness that, in him, meant there would be no discussion.

“No one kills one of these animals.”

It would hardly have helped if he had said it more gently. The first outraged look told him he had cut into the right spot, into a new kind of unrest. One of the men, a coarse fellow whose courage changed quickly, raised his hands and asked openly whether Kral now had more compassion for chickens than for his own crew. Another muttered something about madness. A third stared at the birds as if he could not believe anyone would hesitate, seriously, between starving and roasting.

Kral let them talk until the mood began to slide toward the point where a man either yields, or takes the whole matter into his hands.

Then he explained it.

Not kindly, but so clearly that even the stupidest at least understood the difference between hunger and planning.

“We need eggs,” he said. “And at sea we need something that lives, eats, and can be slaughtered two days later if it has to be. If you eat everything today because the smell of roast meat pleases you more than thinking, then tomorrow I’ll eat your ears off when you come whining to me about provisions.”

That did not bring them understanding, but it brought enough order for the immediate pushback to break. One man still wanted to protest, but Kral stepped in so close that everyone understood how little space lay between a bad remark and a broken jaw. After that, there was no more open debate. The chickens stayed alive, were kept in a roughly built pen, and only a few days later even the first complainer had to admit that eggs in the morning could be an argument you did not talk against for long.

Later they found pigs.

Or rather, they found signs first: churned earth, broken patches in the undergrowth, a smell that was not damp soil or leaves, and then they glimpsed one of the animals slip away between fern and dark trunks, grey, powerful, surprisingly fast. The crew’s mood lifted instantly. Pigs meant not only meat but abundance, even if only for a short while. It took time, however, to turn the idea into a catch, because the animals knew the terrain better than the men and were clever enough not to run where they were needed.

So they built pit traps.

Not deep enough to kill an animal, but deep and narrow enough to stop its run and hold it when the ground above was disguised well enough. Kral watched where the pits went. He did not want to lose a pig because one of his own men broke a leg at dusk, so he walked the paths with the builders more than once, made them show him what had been marked, where it was better not to step at night, and memorised everything with the cold care he gave to things whose mistakes could not be fixed with a few curses.

The first catch was small, wild, and so full of fury that some men were so amused they laughed more than they worked. The second animal was larger and nearly pulled two men down before they bound it properly. But when they finally slaughtered one, cleanly enough, with sharp knives and a near ceremonial focus, the evening truly was a feast.

Meat roasted over open fire, fat hissed as it dripped into the coals, and the smell moved through the camp like a reminder that even on an island where you wash up shipwrecked, the difference between misery and contentment can sometimes be nothing more than being full for one night. They ate, smacked their lips, laughed, even sang, and Kral sat a little apart, a piece of meat in his hand, with the dull feeling that none of this was entirely accidental.

Because he had long suspected someone was helping them.

Not openly. Not with gifts set on the beach, not with men arriving to announce their support. The islanders were not that clumsy. But in him the suspicion had settled that chickens and pigs were not roaming this island simply because the world is sometimes surprisingly generous to castaways. Perhaps their hosts had released these animals long ago. Perhaps they were remnants of older settlements. Perhaps a tacit form of provisioning for emergencies that was never meant to be named officially. Kral did not know. Yet the longer he thought about it, the more he believed it possible that this island was precisely the one they could be allowed to keep without argument.

He also thought about the taboo on the other islands.

At first it had angered him, not because he believed he would find treasure or rescue there, but because any outside order rubbed a man like him the wrong way. Yet the longer they stayed, the more he understood it. A foreign ship strands. Foreign men come ashore. Men, hungry, restless, robbed of their order. Anyone who wants to protect his own islands, his women, children, stores, and sanctuaries excludes risks first. Disease. Violence. Rape. The slow corrosion of order by men with nothing left to lose. Kral would not have acted differently if the roles were reversed. Perhaps not more gently.

Whenever someone in the crew voiced the thought that the other islands might be more fertile, richer, easier, Kral made them work harder. Not from simple cruelty, but because he knew men who dream of forbidden things are best cured with tasks that make their arms heavy and the evening short. Too tired to saw at taboos.

With the weeks it became clear the ship could soon sail again.

The leaks were patched, or rather the entire damaged rear section was rebuilt so thoroughly that Kral looked at it with clenched, unwilling respect. The masts were replaced. The sails were patched, not pretty, but usable. The rigging hung again in a form that wind could carry without tearing to rags at the first hard pull. The biggest problem was no longer timber, it was provisions.

They had no salt.

And without salt, much remained short lived. Fruit rotted. Meat spoiled. Even carefully smoked fish did not keep long enough for a real crossing. Kral calculated and recalculated and still ended with only rough guesses, because too many variables remained uncertain. How long to the mainland. Whether wind and current would favour them. Whether the monster would attack again. Whether the ship would endure the first hard wave outside. In the end he reached no reliable answer, only a decision: the return voyage would not be so long that they had to fail, if they loaded wisely.

So he had fruit harvested, not at random, but selectively. Firm fruit. Less easily bruised. Things that could sit for a few days without collapsing into themselves. Several pigs were caught alive and kept in rough but solid pens. If they stayed aboard, they had meat on legs and did not need to preserve in advance what could not be preserved. Water went into anything sealed tightly enough, and the fishermen worked twice as hard now, because every basket of glittering bodies was both supper and hope.

Kral kept thinking about what would happen if they were attacked again.

He found no answer worthy of the name. Fire on the water had helped once, but only briefly. Decoy boats were gone. Speed was something they could hope for with a patched ship, not guarantee. They had no song. No protective spells either. So in the end he had only the thing men like him fall back on when experience is spent and planning exhausted: that you are fast enough, that the first stretch succeeds, that you reach the mainland and get off the ship as quickly as possible. Whatever could be saved would be sold. After that, he told himself, something would occur to him. So far something always had. You can live a whole life on that sentence, as long as no one asks how often you had to think it with the sea already at your throat.

The Three Crown was drawing nearer.

Kral did not watch the sky with a priest’s devotion or an astronomer’s patience, but he had lived long enough at sea to know when moons begin to matter. Ten days before the actual alignment the tides already felt different. Low tide pulled the water back deeper than he liked, high tide pushed higher over beach and reef, and the difference between them grew more pronounced day by day. Kral took it as a good omen. Or a very bad one. At sea, he thought, the two are often only a matter of the moment you begin to judge.

More than once he went back into the jungle and along the beach farther than a captain strictly needed to. Not from any desire for adventure. From restlessness. He wanted to see the island once more with his own eyes before they left, to know what he was abandoning and what he might be missing. And in doing so they found something that truly made him pause.

Hidden in the jungle, partly beside a lake, fed by small waterfalls and so overgrown that from a few steps away it would have seemed only tangled forest, lay something that must once have been a town, or at least a settlement. Not a living one, not one used in recent times. The stones were old, paths split by roots, walls half sunk, caves open but empty, and everywhere statues stood or lay, clasped by ferns, covered in moss, darkened by water. Some were only torsos, some almost intact, and in those the craftsmanship was striking. Filigree work, fine faces, entwined patterns, hands and garments in stone executed with a patience that felt almost insulting beside the hurried gouges his own men cut into planks. He saw little value in having the place searched.

Not because he saw nothing in it, but because too much argued against it. It looked abandoned, and for a long time. No smoke. No fresh traces. No sign there were supplies or metal that would truly improve their situation. But there were many niches, caves, and shadows where an unwary man could vanish, injure himself, or stir something that knew the island better than he did. So he left it at wonder, and at the thought that even abandoned places can have dignity without offering use.

That they were being watched, he did not doubt.

Not as knowledge in a strict sense, more as a feeling that hardened over the weeks. Sometimes he thought he saw eyes between leaves, once a movement too quick for an animal, once the impression that after he pushed through brush something stayed still behind him longer than it should. But he did not call it fear. He understood he would have done the same if it had been his island. You watch strangers. You count them. You see who among them seeks trouble, who can work, who might get stupid ideas at night.

There was no further contact with the islanders.

Not until shortly before they meant to leave.

It was in the morning, not long after sunrise, when a single narrow boat came in, almost soundless, built so differently from Kral’s dinghies that some men stared as if the shape itself were magic. In it stood the two slender figures Kral already knew from that visit to the larger island. Leather at hips and shoulders, long limbs, that strange way of moving that was soft and precise at once, and that odd sing song in the voice, which his crew now heard for the first time.

The reaction was immediate.

Some made signs against evil. One muttered an old prayer that probably would do little against island beings or sea beasts, but was spoken from habit. Another took a half step back as the two climbed out of the boat. They showed no open hostility, and yet it was instantly clear to the men that these were not people you sat with drunk by a fire and searched for a shared tongue.

The two asked, in their singing, unfamiliar tone, to come along.

Not for long, not forever, but for the crossing, as Kral understood after some back and forth. He resisted. Not only because he did not trust them, but because he saw what his crew would see in their presence. Something foreign. Bad luck. A sign. Something better left on the island if you wanted to get off the beach alive.

Then they said the one argument he needed.

They said they could offer a certain protection against the monster.

Kral did not believe them. Not fully. Perhaps not even halfway. But he needed that sentence more than he needed certainty. Of course his crew objected first. They grumbled, argued, made signs against evil again, and one asked bluntly whether Kral would now take demons aboard, when the ship had only just become watertight.

Kral turned sharp.

He told them that without these two they would have been dead long ago, even if no one had the courage to say it out loud. That the island had been given to them, that animals had been there, that they had been allowed to work without having their throats cut at night. And finally he said what works best on men like these when reason alone fails: What do you think will happen with those two. If you are that afraid, keep your knives sharp and your eyes open. But I will take every chance that might keep that damned thing out there off our necks.

It did not convince them. But it silenced them.

So they sailed, ten days before the Three Crown.

Even now the tides were violent. High tide climbed higher, pressed harder, lifted and pulled more strongly, and even low tide exposed things Kral had not seen in these waters before, reef edges, stone teeth, dark backs beneath the surface. When the ship finally came off the beach and settled onto deeper water, Kral, despite everything, was glad to be at sea. The ship held. The patched planks worked, but held. The mast stood. The sails drew. The water took the hull as something not yet dead.

Kral stood at the helm, looked back at the shrinking island, and hoped for only one thing: to be on land again before the Three Crown.

IX

The days at the Great Market filled up quickly, the way days always do in places like that, where people converge from every direction, where streets turn into rivers of voices, and even those who mean to stay only briefly soon notice that markets have their own way of swallowing hours and then returning them in the evening, strangely unused. By the time they finally reached the city, the weather had already turned noticeably milder. The cold had lost its bite, the rain eased, and although the ground was still deep and filthy and every path ran through brown mud that clung to boots, hooves, and wagon wheels, the world felt, after the past weeks, almost more accessible. It was not beautiful, but it was habitable.

They decided to stay a few days.

Not out of comfort, at least not only, but because they needed information, needed to gather strength, dry rooms, halfway decent food, and the distance that only a larger concentration of people can provide when the road from one goal to the next threatens to trap you too tightly inside your own thoughts. The Great Market offered all of that, and something else as well, something not all of them liked equally: distraction. Stories were for sale everywhere, half truths, fear, rumors, exaggerations, and if you listened long enough you got twelve versions of the same incident from ten mouths.

Grot flourished in it in a predictably unpleasant way, even if Anadar no longer liked to use the word for him. He moved through courtyards and inns like a man who scented suspicious intent everywhere and inadequate answers everywhere, asked questions that demanded less a reply than submission, and managed, even where someone was willing to help kindly, to produce within moments that peculiar irritation that only people leave behind who conduct every conversation like an indictment. He was not alone in being disliked. The whole group seemed to endure him less with each day. Even Son and Indra, who followed him out of loyalty or habit, no longer looked like companions, but more like women who had learned to keep the distance between obedience and open contradiction as narrow as possible.

Morgut mastered the art of keeping Grot away from the group.

He drew him into seemingly harmless conversations, asked about currents, island routes, old coastlines, about the Water School, about bindings, banishments, and the things Grot was only too happy to explain as long as someone pretended that he, of all people, was the greatest factual authority one could hope to consult. And while Morgut gave him that small stage, the others moved more freely. Shara spoke with Isidre, Miene and Siendra listened around, Son and Indra brought back news from the harbor quarters and from the few people who still arrived from the western coastal regions, and Anadar began to turn his free time more and more in another direction.

He withdrew.

Not completely, not so conspicuously that it would have become open concern on the first evening, but with the quiet consistency of a man shifting his habits because something inside him has become stronger than whatever waits outside. At first it was only the night. He took the sword to his room, sat at the foot of the bed, laid the blade across his knees, and spoke with Naaarstr. Then it spread. Even during the day, when the others scattered across the market, he sometimes vanished earlier, stayed away longer, sat in quieter inner courtyards or in half empty rooms above the stables where no one looked for him, and devoted himself to the demon with a focus that surprised even him.

It was a careful exchange.

Neither truly gave the other anything that meant power. Anadar refused to perform the rituals Naaarstr described. Not yet. He let him explain signs, forms of speech, circles, the proper guiding of a line, the relationship between name and form, the setting of a call, the theory of binding and banishing, those cold, dry foundations without which any summoning is only folly. In return, Naaarstr received blood. Not much, never so much that Anadar would have had to admit to himself that it had become a habit, and yet enough that the sword grew more awake, clearer in its voice, more attentive, less like a chained animal and more like a teacher slowly remembering his own role.

“What do you know about the old times,” Naaarstr asked one evening, when Anadar was again sitting before the bed, the door locked, the lamp turned low, and the blade coated with a thin film of blood that was barely visible in the light, but unmistakable to the sword.

“That they were chaotic,” Anadar replied without lifting his eyes. “That boundaries were unclear and the world was more porous.”

Naaarstr laughed softly.

“That is what they want you to believe. Chaotic. As if order ever meant the same as justice. Those times were magnificent. Free. Uncontrolled. Everyone lived in balance with the others. Demons and their summoners, angels, devils, dragons, elves and sorcerers. Everything was in harmony.”

As the voice spoke, images came.

Not like a story being told, but like something foreign breaking into Anadar’s own thinking. Shadows. Vastness. A darkness that was not simply the absence of light, but substance, almost an element. Great horned shapes, heavy, marked by hunger and violence, hunted smaller ones, tore them apart, devoured them with a dull greed that knew nothing of ceremony. No sky. No exit. No hope. Only depth upon depth, and within it something rising only to be swallowed again.

Anadar frowned involuntarily.

“If that is harmony,” he said quietly, “then hell is a strange place for it.”

Naaarstr fell silent for a moment.

“One hell is like another,” he said then. “And you see only fragments. Memories rarely care to be fair.”

“What happened then.”

“The balance was disturbed. Shackles were laid on. Power shifted. Gates were closed. And those who benefited later wrote the words for it.”

Anadar did not accept it at once.

“Tell me about the hell you come from.”

“Why.”

“Because you show me pictures and pretend they are answers.”

This time Naaarstr laughed openly, dark and amused.

“Fine. One hell is like another. Dark. Deep. Full of things that want to grow and have nothing to grow on. After the summoners vanished, the gate to your world stayed shut. And we waited. In the dark. A hell full of demons hungry for blood, and there was none. Not a pleasant place. Not a place where anything improves. Only hunger that grows older.”

“And the relationship to a summoner.”

“A bargain,” Naaarstr said. “He lets us into the light. He gives us the blood we need to grow, to gain power in our dimension. But he binds us. We hate it and need it. We hate the summoner, and he sets tasks for us. If we fulfill them well, we get blood, and blood makes us grow.”

Anadar thought of Frantor. Of the book. Of all the half understood lines behind them that were still waiting to be assembled.

“You show me how to summon,” he said. “You show me how to bind and how to banish, but only lesser spirits, things without real power.”

“And you do the same,” Naaarstr answered, almost mild. “You show me how to craft illusions from fire. How to cleanse. How to channel force without releasing it. You give me theory and call it generosity while withholding your true art. We are more alike than you want.”

Anadar said nothing.

Then he asked, almost casually, and yet with a tension in his voice he could hear himself: “How do I banish you.”

Naaarstr laughed.

Wickedly, slowly, almost tender in its malice.

“That will be complicated. And I do not want to go back yet.”

Conversations like that lasted a long time. Longer than Anadar later believed. They spread, ate through evening and night, left him the next morning later, duller, and at the same time far too awake inside, and at some point he began to hold the thread between that darkness and the reality around him less securely than he realized. The others gathered information in the market, asked shipmen, wagon drivers, coastal traders, innkeepers, men who swore they had seen ships go down, and women convinced the monster itself had existed in their childhood and had merely been called by another name. Anadar noticed less of it than he should have.

Maybe it was the third evening.

Maybe only the fourth.

He lost the sense of exact sequence, and perhaps that was the danger already.

One night, or in a state that felt like night, he found himself at an abyss.

Below him was darkness. Behind him was darkness. Above him as well. He stood on a cliff, and far below saw a black sea striking rock. He heard the roar, heavy and hollow, like the breathing of a world with no morning. No star, no moon, no horizon. Only the drop and the dark water below.

Then the voice came.

Not loud. More inside the roar, inside the whisper of spray, inside the gaps of blackness.

“You have a choice.”

He turned.

No one.

“How is the decision.”

He looked over the edge again. The sea was farther down than it should have been. The wind, if it was wind, smelled not of salt but of cold stone and old blood. He saw no figure, no source, and yet the voice was there, again and again, as if it came not from outside but from the space itself, from the darkness, from what lay behind all things.

“How do you choose.”

He stepped.

Not back.

Not to safety.

Out.

But instead of falling, he was suddenly standing above the sea. Not on a bridge. Not on glass. On nothing, and yet something held him. Beneath him the dark waves kept breaking against the cliff. Ahead was only black.

“How is your choice.”

Something in him wanted to answer. Something else wanted to keep silent. And as that inner split opened, the voice came nearer, no longer in the sea, no longer in the wind, but directly behind his thoughts, soft and pressing at once.

“Anadar.”

He opened his eyes.

Shara sat opposite him.

She smiled at him, but it was not the unburdened smile of the last riding days. There was worry in it, concentration, vigilance, and still something warm that did not leave even now. Only slowly did he understand that he was still in his room, still sitting cross legged before the bed, the sword on his knees, his right hand on the blade, his left half open on the wooden floor as if he had just tried to hold onto something that had slipped his grasp.

Her gaze was deep in his.

And her voice did not come first through her lips, but inside his head.

“I am afraid of losing you.”

She still smiled, as if she wanted to set at least that gentleness against the hardness of the sentence.

Anadar blinked. For a moment he was not sure if this was reality or only the next, better layer of the dream.

“I am still here,” he said.

His voice sounded rough. чужд.

Shara tilted her head slightly. “What is your new friend telling you that you keep away from us.”

He wanted to answer, but with the first word he felt how unreliable the things in his head still were.

“I… it’s complicated. It…”

She watched him for a long time, and while she did, she was already in his mind. Not violently, not demanding, not as an intrusion, but like a light falling into a dark room and breaking nothing, yet suddenly revealing how full it is of shadows. Anadar felt her searching, felt her take the thread he was hanging from and, very carefully, test how far he had already been pulled out of reality.

“You are slipping more and more,” she said quietly. “You are binding yourself to that thing in your sword. It is taking possession of you.”

The words struck him sharper because part of him wanted to reject them at once. Another part knew she was right.

Naaarstr stirred.

Not as a clear voice this time, more as resistance, as darkness that tried to retreat deeper into the corners of his thinking and yet could not quite vanish.

Shara did not let up.

She did not push directly against the demon as if she meant to banish it. It was not the right moment for that, and perhaps not the right way. Instead she flooded his mind with something else. With reality. With images that were solid and not hungry. With the faces of the others. With the coming day. With the smell of wet horses and the sound of the market outside. With the tasks ahead. With the sea monster. With Son and Indra. With Grot’s ridiculous stiffness. With Morgut’s laughter. With everything that had belonged to Anadar before the sword began placing a second world inside his skull.

It was as if something in him was pushed back, not hard, but firm. The darkness did not lose its power suddenly, but it grew smaller, narrower, driven back where it belonged, into deeper corners, into the spaces between, into those places from which it could no longer pull him away unnoticed.

Anadar shuddered. Once. Then again, harder, like a man shaking water from his collar and only then noticing how cold he has become.

“You are right,” he said at last, wiping his blood smeared hand across his face. “It is pulling me toward it.”

Shara smiled, and this time it was softer.

She lifted her hand, brushed her thumb over his cheek, then over his brow, as if she had to convince herself that he was truly back, and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

“I can feel it,” she said. “Do not be afraid. I am here. I will watch you. I will pull you back.”

In that moment she was not only Shara, not only companion, lover, mage, but exactly what his mind needed to keep from tipping further. An anchor. Something that does not whisper back into the abyss, does not ask about the choice, but simply is there, warm, steady, unshakeable.

Only now did he notice how much time had shifted.

“How long,” he asked.

Shara looked at him, serious. “Several days. Not entirely gone. But not really here. You ate when it was brought to you. You answered when someone spoke to you directly. But you were not fully present. I think I came in time.”

That hit him deeper than all of Naaarstr’s malice.

“Why did you not earlier…”

“Because I wanted to be sure first. Because I did not want to collide with something in you while I did not know whether you were still standing against it yourself.”

He nodded slowly.

Then she brought him up to date.

“We leave tomorrow,” she said. “We found a passage. A captain who sees it as a chance to get through alive if we are aboard. No one really dares to go out to sea anymore, but the one we found would rather not sit stuck here. He believes he will not be better protected than with us.”

Anadar tried to take it all in and realized how hard it was to use thoughts like tools again instead of loose threads.

“Information.”

“Little. And nothing you can fully trust. No one is truly at sea anymore. Different ships are said to have gone down, no survivors, no one who saw it clearly from start to finish. A lot of story in it. But the reports that keep repeating speak of lightning and singing, of tentacles and lights. Nothing truly useful. Only enough to know that out there is something larger than a single exaggeration.”

As she spoke, she brushed his hair again, almost unconsciously.

“The refugee situation has eased. No new people are coming from the north. Those who are here have scattered. There are still tensions, but they are manageable. And still no sign of the cause of that aversion, that pressure, that flight. Did your friend reveal anything about it.”

Anadar closed his eyes for a moment and saw again the cliff, the sea, the voice. Then he shook his head slowly.

“No. Or nothing I would trust.”

Shara nodded as if she had expected nothing else.

“In seven days it is Three Crown.”

The sentence hung in the room.

Outside, a door slammed. Somewhere in the courtyard someone laughed again, shorter, harder. The lamp cast Shara’s shadow against the wall, soft and moving, and for the first moment in days, perhaps for the first time since he had begun to give himself so deeply to Naaarstr, Anadar felt reality regain shape.

Not easy.

Not safe.

But enough.

Shara stayed with him until he finally took the sword from his knees and set it aside.

X

Gudi had built herself a rhythm, and like almost every rhythm born of real unease, it looked sensible from the outside, almost harmless. Every morning she went to one of the wells near the South Gate, not because it was the shortest route, and not because the water there was better or cooler than elsewhere in the city, but because from there she could see the riders, if one of those Sondra parties came back through the gate once again. Then she carried the water back, bucket after bucket, past the stables where those graceful animals had last stood, as if they were merely ordinary guest horses and not part of a riddle that had been gnawing its way deeper into her head for weeks. After that she tended her garden, the beds, the seedlings, the herbs, the small signs of growth that demanded her attention every day, and yet nothing about that routine was truly calm, because beneath everything lay the same taut expectancy, the hope that something would finally happen again, a glance, a hoofbeat, a shimmer of cloth at the gate opening, anything that would show her she had not imagined it all.

For weeks, nothing happened.

No Sondra party, no veiled rider, no sign that beneath the ancient gardens there was anything hidden beyond bare stone and her own habit of scenting secrets where others saw only masonry. She began to fear that the whole incident had expanded inside her over the weeks like a shadow in the evening sun, growing larger, more mysterious, more significant than it might have been in the moment itself. Perhaps she had seen two strangers, perhaps a mechanism, perhaps a disappearance, and everything else had only later become the story. Maybe. It was an annoyingly reasonable thought, and precisely because of that she did not like it.

Then, one morning, the group was there again.

They rode in through the gate so abruptly that in the first instant Gudi nearly dropped the bucket. The same graceful, almost soundless way of riding. The same slender, tall figures. The same fabrics that hardly fluttered when they moved, they seemed to glide. The same animals, proud and light footed, as if even their hooves did not quite belong in this city. Gudi was prepared. She set the bucket down without caring whether water sloshed over the rim, and withdrew to her observation point, not to the same place as before but to another angle that gave her a better view of the path, more diagonal, higher, with more shadow between herself and the garden walk.

She waited.

All through the first day.

No one came. Not into the old part of the gardens, not to her plot, not to the place where it had clicked last time. In the evening she made sure once more that the Sondra’s animals were indeed in the stables, so they still had to be in the city, and then she returned unwillingly to her room, without sleeping, without wanting to admit to herself how nervous she was.

On the second day she waited again.

Nothing.

That was worse than open disappointment, because the city around her continued at the same time, indifferent, busy, with lessons, water, work, and small duties, all of which knew nothing of the fact that Gudi grew angrier with every hour. Her obligations could not be postponed forever. Her plants wanted water. The garden wanted care. And Gnok had repeatedly had it conveyed that he wanted to see her. Not sometime. Soon.

On the third evening she finally tore herself loose.

She was half angry at herself, half at the Sondra, and almost angriest at the possibility that she had been standing watch for nothing all along while elsewhere someone might be waiting for her to finally appear. So she climbed the winding paths up to Gnok’s highest chamber, fast, impatient, almost leaping rather than walking on the last steps, and when she stood before the closed door and was about to knock, she heard voices.

Not loud.

Not clear.

But there was a second voice.

She stopped and, without meaning to, laid a hand against the wood.

“…old friend…”

Then only fragments of conversation, indistinct, as if they were reaching her from deeper inside the room, muffled by curtains or rows of books. Once she thought she heard the word “harvest,” then again only the tone of two people speaking to each other in a way that did not sound like ordinary instruction. Gudi knocked. Not particularly politely. More with the kind of determination with which someone knocks who is already half elsewhere in their mind.

It took a moment.

Then the door opened.

Gnok stood in front of her.

Alone.

At least, no one else was visible in the room.

He seemed absent, and in a way that immediately confused Gudi, because it was not mere distraction. His gaze still hung a little on the sky, as if he had carried something with him that remained out there, and when he greeted her, his voice sounded slower than usual, as if it had to pass through a thought before it became words.

Gudi stepped inside and looked around.

“You weren’t alone,” she said.

Gnok looked at her, then past her to the window, beyond which dusk was already shifting into the first clear colors of night.

“Open your eyes,” he murmured, almost gently. “No one there.”

There was no mockery in his tone, and perhaps that unsettled her more than anything else.

He gestured out into the night.

“Don’t you see it. This Three Crown will be extraordinary. Jonsus is visible. Right there above. A sign.”

He kept talking, and in the first moments Gudi barely grasped that he was speaking of the same celestial bodies he had explained to her before, only now with an excitement that was unusual for him. He went to his model of the star system, that intricate framework of rings, spheres, and finely worked arms, where he could sometimes spend hours, and he pointed first to the three moons, then to that one planet that moved on its path inside and close by the world. He explained how forces shift when such a body draws nearer, how balances catch differently, how rare constellations do not only touch the tides along coasts, but sometimes also reach down into things far deeper than water alone.

Gudi listened, but only halfway.

She stood there, nodded, asked a question here and there, more to avoid being rude than out of real focus, and yet she noticed that Gnok was not really speaking with her but through her, into a thought older and larger than this evening. She was more witness to a conversation he had started before she knocked, and now continued with her as a random listener. It confused her. It also made her impatient. Time pressed. The Sondra were somewhere in the city, perhaps in the gardens, perhaps right now, and Gnok spoke of sky forces, of Jonsus, of a shift one could not see with the naked eye and that could nevertheless change everything.

When she finally left, he was still speaking.

She murmured a farewell, received an absent answer, and was already hurrying down the steps again while above his voice kept going, as if she had not truly interrupted him, but had only touched his thinking for a moment.

“Pointless,” she thought as she went down. “That was completely pointless.”

And yet something of his tone clung to her, something about the way he might have said “harvest,” or how that word had reached her ear through the door at all. She pushed it aside as she turned again toward the gardens. There was no time for astronomy now. Not if something might finally be happening below.

She slipped back to her observation place.

Night had fully fallen by then, but not dark in the usual sense. Above the city the moons hung, not yet fully united in the Three Crown, but already bright enough that walls, paths, and trees gained a sharp, almost unnaturally clear edge. Gudi pulled her cloak tighter and waited.

In the middle of the night she was jolted awake by sounds.

Not loud enough to rouse everyone. But different from the ordinary breathing of a city, different from night wind or an animal in the bushes. A scrape of cloth. A soft hoofstep. Then voices.

They were there.

At last.

She peered out from her hiding place and saw the Sondra figures in the pale moonlight. They moved with the same certainty as the first time, but now Gudi was closer, much closer, and she could see how one of them laid a hand on the wall, then pressed on specific stones, not at random but in a sequence as natural to him as opening an ordinary door is to other people. As he did it he murmured something in that singing language, soft and yet full of precision, almost like a key made of sounds. Then came the click.

This time clearer.

Dry. Metallic. Final.

A small door opened in the wall.

Gudi did not think.

Later she would curse herself for it, and even as it happened she was already cursing herself, but that changed nothing. She sprang from her hiding place before caution could gather inside her, shot toward the opening and almost fell rather than walked down the first steps in the wall. Her foot slipped, she slammed her shoulder against stone, swore silently, because in that instant she was certain everyone in the garden must have heard her.

But nothing happened.

No shout. No hand grabbing her. No weapon at her throat.

Only behind her the door fell shut.

The sound was dull, final, far heavier than the click before, and suddenly she sat there, half on the steps, half leaned against the wall, in complete darkness and with the sudden, cold knowledge that the way back up was blocked.

It grew cooler.

Not the dry night cool of the city, but another cold, stone cold, rising from depth. Gudi remained motionless for a moment and listened. Nothing. No step. No murmuring. No breath except her own, which sounded far too loud.

So she stood.

If the way back was closed, only down remained.

She felt along the wall and went carefully onward. Step by step. The stairs were even, clean hewn, not accidentally old, but old on purpose. One step after another. Further down. Then around a corner. Down again. Another corner. More steps. She saw nothing but darkness, yet she sensed how the space changed, how the pressure of stone widened, how the air no longer felt so tight. At some point, after a span of time she could no longer measure, she saw a blue glow below.

Faint at first.

Then stronger.

It did not lie flat on the ground, it seemed to fill the space itself, as if it came from water or glass or from something that could not quite decide between the two. Gudi stopped again, blinked, went more slowly, and then turned the last corner.

No one was there.

At least, not at first glance.

Before her lay a hall.

A huge, blue lit hall, so vast that in the first second she could not understand how something like this could be hidden beneath the ancient gardens without the entire city feeling it in its sleep. The space was higher than some temple halls, and above it stretched no ordinary vault, but something that held the starry sky itself within it. Not painted, not suggested, but as if one could see through stone into the night, into moons and stars whose light sank down, broken bluish, like cold water.

In the middle of the hall lay a clear pool.

Not as large as a real lake under open sky, but large enough to feel still and complete, as if it did not belong in a room but in a place without walls. Above it an apparatus had been installed, enormous, filigreed, made of rings, arms, bowls, struts, hooks, and framed panes of glass or crystal, all connected in a way that looked at once like mechanism, ritual, and star map. Some parts glowed. Others stood still and waiting. And the blue light of the hall seemed to be born properly only from this connection of water and device.

Gudi forgot all caution.

She stepped into the space, went toward the center, slowly at first, then faster, her head lifted, eyes wide, wholly in that state where wonder pushes every other thought aside. She had never seen anything like it. Everything in her pulled toward that center, toward the water, toward the rings, toward the sense that something ancient and yet alive was waiting here for the Three Crown.

“You’re right, old friend,” a voice said behind her. “She’s more curious than a cat.”

Gudi spun around.

Three Sondra were coming toward her, armed, veiled, with that calm, dangerous steadiness that left no doubt that none of their steps were accidental.

And in their middle stood Gnok.

He smiled, and she collapsed unconscious to the floor.