Anadar III/III

XI

First, he looked around and could not comprehend what he was seeing.

He was no longer where he had been a moment ago, no longer in that corridor, in that cold stone depth where bluish torches burned and a mirror had become something it never should have been. Instead there was brightness, not glaring, but all encompassing, a clear, milky light thrown back by high windows or pale stone, and a smell that felt foreign and yet strangely familiar at once: warm wood, fresh bread, beeswax, dust that did not reek of decay, but of order, of rooms that were used and cared for. It was that smell, more than anything, that unsettled him, because in his state he could not tell whether he was sensing it in the present or from some corner of memory the passage had torn open inside him.

Slonda shook his head.

It did not help.

Everything kept spinning, as if the world had not shifted around him, but his own gaze had come loose and was now sloshing inside his skull like water in a cup carried too hastily. He felt sick, so thoroughly sick that the idea of walking upright seemed almost presumptuous, and his head rang, not with pain alone, but with something that still had to be forced back into ordered shape. Voices were there, or remnants of voices, echoes, broken clauses, the dull after tremor of words he had spoken in the ritual, or that had been spoken to him without his truly hearing them. His vision was not clear. The edges of things refused to stay in place. Bright wood shimmered at the margins. An archway seemed, for an instant, farther away than it could be, then suddenly too near.

He had to brace himself.

His knees nearly buckled, and before he could even decide whether dignity mattered here, he sank very inelegantly to the floor, caught himself with one hand against the wall, and finally just sat on the cold slabs, legs half drawn up, back leaning against something that might have been stone or wood. For a while he did nothing at all except breathe and try not to topple. His circulation was low, so low that even lifting his head took effort. He told himself he had to gather himself. Instead he closed his eyes.

Whether he slept, he did not know.

Perhaps it was sleep. Perhaps only a sinking into drift. Perhaps unconsciousness with too much remaining awareness to honestly call it that. His vision flickered even behind his lids, and behind the darkness there was movement, images, shifts in light, that unpleasant twilight between waking and being gone, where a person cannot say whether what he sees comes from his own head or from the world he can no longer grasp. He was still sick. He knew he needed to focus. That knowledge returned again and again, like a rope someone kept throwing in his direction, but his fingers only half closed around it.

At some point he hauled himself up.

Maybe after minutes. Maybe much later. Time in that state had no reliable edge. He found the wall, pressed his palm to the stone, felt coolness, felt support, and then began to walk, slowly. Through corridors he knew and yet did not know. The lines felt familiar, the angles, the length of certain stretches, the proportion of door to stair, niche to pillar, and yet everything was wrong. Too bright. Too new. Too complete. Nothing cracked, nothing crooked, nothing touched by that silent old age that in his memory had made Tandor’s library both venerable and deeply unsettling. He climbed the stairs, slowly, one hand always on the wall, and everything remained in a state of dimness, milky, slightly displaced, as if the world were trailing him by half a second.

He passed through a magnificent reading hall.

Or something that had to be a reading hall, only brighter, larger, more alive than he had ever seen it. Figures moved between tables, people in robes that looked unfamiliar, and yet they did not behave as if he were a stranger. They bustle, he thought in a half ridiculous, half desperate word, they bustle and do not pay attention to me. One person stepped aside without looking up, as if Slonda had already been categorized in peripheral vision and deemed none of their concern. A woman with a bundle of parchment made room for him without a word. No one addressed him. No one asked whether he was well. No one seemed to harbor the slightest doubt that he belonged there.

He kept going.

At some point, without consciously thinking it through, he knew which direction his chamber had to be, and when he reached it and pushed the door open, the sight hit him almost harder than the stairs had.

His chamber.

And yet not his.

It was too empty. Too tidy. Too much set to the beginning. Nothing lay on the table. No loose rolls, no chalk marked wooden sticks, no half notes, no bowls with dried ink at the bottom, no second blanket casually thrown over a chair, none of the small, bitterly familiar chaos in which he usually thought and worked. Everything was simple. Ordered. Fresh. A bed. A table. A wardrobe. A jug. A room that looked as if it had been prepared for someone who would only later begin to live in it.

He was not well.

It took his last strength to reach the bed, and when he sank onto it there was no caution and no elegance, only the raw need not to stand anymore. The mattress was firm. The blanket smelled of sun and storage. He closed his eyes and fell away at once.

The dream returned.

Or the vision.

Or whatever it was that makes no sense to separate, in states like this, between the two.

This time he stood on the other side. He did not know how he knew it, but the knowledge was simply there, clearer than any thought he had forced on himself by day. Before him lay the ruined library in blue light, weather worn, gnawed through, half sunk into shadow, and he himself stood not there, but in the brightly lit catacombs, the clean, new, smooth catacombs, as if through the tear he had glimpsed a world that was the same and yet time shifted, not dream against reality, but one side against the other. He did not even marvel. That was the most frightening part. He stood and looked, and nothing in him rose in protest, as if his mind had already spent its outrage.

When he truly woke, or at least reached the state that could honestly be called waking again, he did not know how long he had slept.

Hours, perhaps.

More.

His body was still weak, but differently weak than before, less like a collapsing scaffold and more like something that had been underwater too long and was now laboring to remember how to live with air. It took time before he could sit up. Longer still before he did not immediately have to cradle his head in his hands. Then he forced himself to his feet and looked around his chamber again, clearer now, slower now, with the cold attention of a man who senses it would be better if the mistake finally showed itself somewhere.

It did not.

The chamber really was tidy.

And new.

Or at least new enough that it did not belong to the order of his time.

Food stood on the table.

Fresh bread. Fruit. A jug of light beer that smelled more bitter than he expected, almost herbal. He was so hungry that his first reach for the bread was almost involuntary, and as he chewed he realized how badly his body had been craving something tangible. The food was no dream. The beer was cool. The bitterness lingered on his tongue. He sat for a long time and ate slowly, as if each chewed mouthful could anchor him deeper into a reality that would only hold if even its simplest substance, bread, fruit, drink, proved reliable.

Where am I, he asked himself.

He did not ask it aloud, because suddenly he was afraid of his own voice. It could have made the room finally, definitively real.

Slowly it dawned on him that this was his chamber and yet not his, not in the sense that someone had taken it from him, but in that far worse sense where a place remains the same and still belongs to another order. He washed as best he could, scooped water from the jug, ran a hand through his hair, looked at his own hands, and could not decide whether it comforted him or unsettled him more that they were the same.

Then he opened the door.

A few people moved about outside, not many, but enough that an empty corridor would have felt like an exception, not a default. He did not know them. Not their faces. Not their clothes. Everything was somehow the same and yet different. The colors duller, the cuts older, or perhaps newer, in any case not from the time his eye was used to. At first he slipped out cautiously, almost furtively, as if he were the one who did not belong. But no one paid him special attention. A young man carrying a stack of wooden tablets stepped around him. A woman passed with two bowls and gave him a brief nod without hesitation. The farther he went, the more he dared.

He reached the library courtyard.

And there the sense of otherness struck even harder. Everything was, in truth, as he knew it. The position of the well. The walls. The arcades. The paths. And yet everything was fresher, sharper, perhaps smaller, less twisted, less grown over. It was as if someone had rebuilt Tandor and its library from the memory of an older age, before the centuries could settle onto it.

He left the library.

Tandor outside was different.

Much smaller, he thought at once, and then no, perhaps not smaller, but younger. Built differently. Less dense. The streets did not run in the familiar loops he could have walked blind. Some houses were missing. Others stood where, in his time, walls or alleys had been. He walked through streets that were Tandor and not Tandor, lost his way, and within moments felt a fear deeper than confusion, because it did not touch only the place but his own judgment. If the city could be this different and still bear the same name, how much of himself was still reliable.

So he fled back into the library.

Quickly, too quickly, almost shamefully, as if the city might see him get lost and thereby confirm something he still could not speak aloud. He sat somewhere at the edge, half hidden between a pillar and a shelf, and watched the activity. People went about their work. They wrote. Carried. Read. Spoke softly. Barely noticed him. He did not understand the world. He was agitated, shaken, and the longer no one reacted to him, the worse it became, because that proved that his presence here was not felt as a rupture.

At last he withdrew to his room again.

There he talked to himself.

At first only half aloud, then more clearly, because his own voice was at least something familiar, even if it did nothing but ask questions with no answers. He doubted his sanity with an almost scientific thoroughness. Was this delirium. A reverberation of the ritual. A kind of poisoning. A collapse of the mind brought on by the overload of the last weeks. He ran through the possibilities, rejected them, took them up again, reached no end, and felt so cowed by his situation that even the thought of asking for help became unbearable. Whom could he even explain it to.

It took time before he dared to leave the chamber again.

Then he decided to do the only sensible thing.

To read.

If the world had gone mad, then perhaps it was at least consistently mad, and a library, Slonda thought, was the place where consistency could still be found in books. So he went down. Through the corridors. Into the deeper areas. And there he was struck by the next blow.

So bright.

So many books.

Not decayed, not half read, not gnawed by water or made brittle by centuries, but orderly, abundant, in masses, spine beside spine, neatly labeled. He could read the titles. And that made everything worse.

Of the Twelve.

Order under the Sign of the Twelve.

The Codex of the Twelve.

Foundations of the Codex.

He pulled out a book. The script looked old, yes, but not in the way old books in his time looked old, rather like something written only recently, wearing an older style. The pages were well preserved. Too well. He leafed through, read lines, understood words, understood meaning, and with every breath the certainty grew in him that this was no deception that stumbled over details. This was internally coherent.

It cannot be, he thought.

What is happening here.

He sat down again on a chair, more falling than truly sitting, and this time despair seized him, not only fear. He felt he had reached a boundary beyond which his mind was no longer a tool, only a sensitive surface on which more impossibilities kept falling.

“Master Slonda.”

The voice was familiar.

So familiar it almost hurt.

He turned.

Drinda stood there.

Smiling.

Not older, not distorted by light or dream logic, simply Drinda as he knew him, only with an expression Slonda had never seen on him, calm, certain, almost comforting.

Drinda stepped closer, as if nothing about this situation was suited to drive a man into panic.

“You’ll be well again soon,” he said. “Do not be afraid. What you are suffering now is a known phenomenon. You are suffering the aftereffects of the time passage. It will settle.”

Slonda stared at him.

And in that moment it was not the talk of time, not the word passage, not even the prospect that all of this might be explainable that struck him first.

It was that Drinda stood here, smiling and speaking, as if this were precisely the answer Slonda should have reached all along.

XII

Roto and Kolnidranooora rode north from Ashambrat, but not along any route a sensible caravan master would have suggested, not toward the Fiery Fortress, not via the Great Market, and not along any of those broad trade lines where you could at least say that every third rider carried the same worries you did. They kept farther east, first northeast, always following the hope that the coast might grant them a shortcut, a fisherman, a small coastal boat, a merchant ship, anything that could get them to Gontar faster than riding ever would. Because however soberly they could think, they also knew with perfect clarity that time was slipping away. Hokn’f had not given them the assignment with ceremonial gravity only to watch the days pass with calm detachment. He wanted results, and he wanted them before the Three Crown, and everything in Roto’s inner rhythm pushed against that demand from the very start, like a man pushing into wind.

First, though, they had to get out of the desert. And the desert, even if you had grown up in it and believed you knew it better than most, was never something you could simply “leave behind” just because you were in a hurry. Hours became days. At first the sand still lay open and wide in flat lines, pale in the morning and blinding at noon, and the horses moved through it with that trained endurance only animals develop once they have learned that landscape can be resistance. Then the ground changed gradually. Darker patches appeared where more stone lay in the sand than sand over the stone. Then came rolling land, low hills that looked as if the desert had paused there for a moment and considered whether it wanted to lose ground to something else. Later the colors split for good. Rock surfaced openly. The sand grew thinner and dirtier, threaded with scree and hard, pale stone. After that came grass, first miserly, then denser, and finally those forests that always feel like an insult to men from Ashambrat, with their shade, their dampness, their opacity, asserting a different kind of world.

Along the coast they found no ship. Not one that could truly help them. They rode through villages where fishing boats had been hauled high up, higher than would normally be necessary, as if even the land no longer fully trusted the waters. They asked in small towns, in harbor settlements, in inns where salt hung in the air and the stink of seaweed crept into the sleeping rooms, whether anyone would take them, even just a little way, even only to the mouth of the great river or to a better harbor farther north, and almost everywhere they got the same response. Tired looks. Half a smile. A shrug with more caution behind it than courtesy. The rumors had long since spread. Hardly anyone went willingly back out to fish any farther than necessary. Some still went into the bays. Others stayed entirely on land. And if you show up in places like that asking for passage, you learn very quickly how little heroism lives in men with wife and children at home who must choose between hunger and open sea.

So they rode up the coast. Hoping again and again. Turned away again and again. The days until the Three Crown shrank beneath them. At first there were still enough that you could move the number around in your mind without dread. Then there were fewer. Less than a week, and both of them already knew that without a ship they would never reach Gontar in time. Yet that was not even the greatest obstacle. They had not counted on something else. Not because it was unimaginable, but because if you grow up in the desert, you know floods only from stories, and still you cannot picture how thoroughly water rewrites a landscape once there is enough of it.

The great river that ran down from the Great Market to the sea was in flood. Melt season, the people said. Enough ice had fallen in the mountains, and spring was now chewing through it faster than the ground could drink it. The river, usually broad but sluggish, had become a traveling mass, brown, full, impatient, eating at the banks, leaving trees tilted, taking jetties with a kind of indifference that Roto almost hated personally. Until the Great Market, they were told, there was no usable ford. No bridge you would trust. No village whose people would dare the crossing even for money. In a week or two, yes, perhaps. Then the water would fall. Then you could cross again. Then. Then. That hateful, false word that comes so easily to the lips of those who do not still have hundreds of miles and an overmaster’s anger ahead of them.

Grinding their teeth, they abandoned the coastal plan and rode west toward the river, keeping along the edge of the current because there was now nothing else to do but reach the Great Market and force passage there, or at least find it. Both of them were sullen, not loud, not complaining, but in that sharp, quiet way that grows in men when they see time conspiring against them. Hokn’f would not be pleased. They did not need to say it aloud. He was riding with them anyway.

On the morning everything changed, a fine drizzle fell. Not real rain, more a cold dampness that clung to garments. The river ran beside them like an animal too large and too awake for the bed it was meant to fit. The water foamed at the edges, carried branches, clumps of grass, and once even half a trunk, and the sound was louder than the road, louder than their horses, almost louder than their thoughts.

Then they saw the ship. At first only as a shape in the mist, a dark, slanted back on the water. Then clearer. A sailing ship that truly was moving downstream, borne by the current and yet steered, slow enough to recognize, fast enough that any attempt to catch it from land would have been laughable. Roto halted his horse. Kolnidranooora looked over as well. They said nothing. No words were needed. A plan began to form, one of those plans that in the first instant looks more like possibility than prudence, and for that reason is dangerous.

Roto dismounted. He loosened the fastening on his saddle, pulled out the folded carpet, and spread it with the care of a man who knows perfectly well that flying carpets are only light and elegant in stories. In truth they are moody, resistant, and above all difficult whenever damp is involved. He laid the weave on a patch that was not too muddy, smoothed the edges, and stared out at the ship for a moment as if he could think the distance a little smaller.

Kolnidranooora held the horses. He said nothing. Roto could read it in his look. Flying the carpet was not easy. In the desert, with open space, dry air, and few obstacles, a practiced man could control it, even when sand whipped his face. Here everything was against him. Moisture. Wind off the river. A moving target. If the carpet got wet, it would fly worse. If Roto fell into the water, it would almost certainly be over, not only for the attempt, but for him. He could not swim. The thought of plunging into that brown, dragging torrent sent a shiver through his back that had nothing to do with the drizzle.

He lifted off. The carpet responded sluggishly at first, then with that peculiar pliancy that always came once the first hesitation was overcome. Roto gained height, only a little at first. He did not want to fight the wind before he had to, and he guided himself out over the river. His plan was simple enough that in a calmer world it might have sounded almost sensible. Do not approach from the front, do not risk having the ship run toward him and steal his angle, but catch up from behind, overtake, slide alongside, match speed, and then jump down into the middle of the deck. As few maneuvers as possible. As little heroism as possible. As little water as possible.

It worked better than he would have dared to hope. He came in from behind, the ship’s sails first beneath him, then beside him, feeling the wind cut differently now that not only the river but the ship itself was breaking the air. Slowly he gained, first to the stern line, then farther forward, until he hovered about a meter above the deck. The men aboard stared at him. Mouths open, not even hostile, just completely stunned, as if things from old tales had dropped from the sky, things whose existence you never fully ruled out, and yet never truly planned for. A man flying on a carpet is, even in places full of stories, still far from ordinary experience.

Roto lowered the carpet toward the center of the ship. Same height. Same speed. He felt the weave working under him in the damp wind, not unwilling, but nervous, as if it wanted to make very clear that this was a good moment to end the nonsense. He jumped. He landed cleanly. The carpet sagged behind him onto the planks, fluttered once, and then lay there like an animal that is offended because it was used for something it would never have suggested.

Roto straightened. Water dripped from the hem of his cloak. Men stared at him. The deck swayed slightly beneath him while the river raced on under the keel. And by first impulse he reached for what felt most familiar as authority. “I demand that you stop. I am Roto, Master of Winds.” The sailors looked at each other, baffled. No one said anything. No one did anything. Not because they did not understand him, but because the sentence, for all its dignity, broke on something very simple, namely the fact that a ship on a flooded river does not stop just because a mage finds it appropriate to speak in commands.

“I demand,” Roto began again, louder, and now uncertainty had entered his voice, not much, just enough that an attentive person could have heard it.

“Even if we wanted to,” said a voice from higher up on deck, “it is simply impossible in this current.”

The captain had appeared and looked at him with a mix of astonishment and sober caution, at the figure who had just fallen out of the air onto his ship and now apparently expected them to push the river aside for him. Roto opened his mouth. But before he could find something fitting, another voice carried across the deck.

“Roto.”

He knew that voice. Too smooth, too self assured, too familiar to mistake for any other man.

“What are you doing so far from the desert, my friend.”

Grot stepped onto the deck as well. He came toward him, not groomed in the literal sense, because the river wind and the weather had long since stripped every smooth surface from his cloak, but groomed in posture, in gaze, and in that unpleasantly self evident way that made him seem, even on a moving ship in dangerous current, as if he already owned the better explanation of the situation. Roto stared at him. Of all ships on all rivers. Of all people.

Grot stopped in front of him and did not look displeased. “You have,” he said, and now there was that small, unmistakable satisfaction in his voice, “landed on the right ship. We are on our way to the Wind Islands.”

Far behind them, on the bank, Kolnidranooora watched his companion. He had seen Roto lift off, saw him labor his way toward the ship, saw him land, and for a moment he had still hoped the matter would go cleanly. Perhaps they would dock farther ahead. Perhaps they would use the current but then slip ashore somewhere. Perhaps Roto would come back or send a sign. But the ship went on, faster than felt possible from land, and soon it was out of sight, first behind a bend, then behind the low trees and mist ribbons above the river.

Kolnidranooora held the horses. He waited. There was nothing else to do. He could not follow. His own skill with the carpet was not good enough, not even close. In the desert for short distances, perhaps. Over open water, in drizzle, with current and a moving target, it would not have been a maneuver but an artful way to break his own neck. So he stayed, standing on the bank, staring down into the brown, traveling water, and waited longer than was wise, simply because hope sometimes takes the same shape as stubbornness.

When no one returned and no ship appeared, he set off. Downstream. Perhaps, he thought, they would dock farther ahead. Perhaps Roto had managed to stop the ship after all. Perhaps the captain would put in at a better place. Perhaps. The word was light while it was still day. So he rode along the river as fast as the ground allowed. The current kept pulling beside him, indifferent, and the horses grew nervous whenever the track slipped down into the softened bank. He scanned every outcrop, every cove, every flatter stretch where a ship might dock.

When dusk fell, all hope drained away. The ship was nowhere to be seen. No sail. No call. No smoke. Nothing. Only the river and the darkening land. Only then did it truly reach him that he could now be alone here. Not only for an hour. Not only until tomorrow. Alone with two horses, a carpet that barely helped him, an assignment that had separated him from his partner, and a world that did not care whether this was a mishap or the beginning of a larger stupidity.

He stopped. The sky was almost dark. The first stars pushed through the wet edges of cloud. Behind him the desert lay measured in days. Ahead of him the river, the sea, perhaps the islands, perhaps Gontar, perhaps none of it at all. Kolnidranooora stood on the bank and did not know what to do next.

XIII

The confusion deepened further.

Not in the simple way a person is confused when they wake in a strange city, or after too much wine can no longer quite piece together the evening, but more thoroughly, more deeply, down into the very pillars his mind usually leaned on to separate world from illusion, memory from present, and madness from mere overload. Slonda’s entire worldview began to sway. It was not only that Drinda stood before him, smiling, alive, calm, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be here and receive him in this state. It was the way everything else around them both confirmed and contradicted itself at once. The library was Tandor and not Tandor. His chamber was his, and yet not his. The books spoke of things that in his thinking had only been half weathered traces, and here they looked as if someone had written them down yesterday. Too much had become possible, and too much should have remained impossible.

He could not stand any longer.

His mind refused to take in what his eyes were seeing. His heart hammered too fast and too hard, as if it wanted to work its way out through his ribs and out of this situation by brute force. His stomach cramped. In his head there was still that dull throbbing, no longer quite as bottomless as immediately after the passage through, but still there, as if voices were echoing in a room you could not close. He took a step, wanted to say something, perhaps Drinda’s name, perhaps a question, perhaps only a stubborn no against reality itself, and in the very next moment he had to clutch a pillar because the floor beneath him wanted to slide sideways.

Drinda smiled knowingly.

Not mockingly. Not pitying. More with the quiet certainty of a man who has long expected a reaction and therefore does not flinch when it arrives.

“Come,” he said softly.

He took the older man carefully by the arm and led him out, not quickly, not pressing, but with the matter of fact assurance of someone who has no doubt that, in this moment, he is exactly the person you must follow if you do not want to fall completely into yourself. They went into the courtyard garden, beneath an oak old enough that its branches even here looked like something from an earlier age, and there Drinda had him sit down. Not on a chair, but on a low stone bench, half in shade, half in the gentler light of afternoon. Then he sent for tea.

The tea came.

Slonda noticed it almost as little as he noticed the young woman who brought the bowls, bowed, and disappeared again as if Drinda were an authority you obey without hesitation. Only when the warmth of the cup drew into his hands did he realize he was freezing.

They sat a long time in silence beneath the shade.

Drinda let him.

That too was strange. A younger man would have talked, explained, hurried, tried to make things small so they might seem bearable. Drinda did none of that. He only sat there, calm, in a composure Slonda did not know in him, and precisely because of that it unsettled him in an almost physical way.

At last Drinda began to speak.

“What is happening to you right now is entirely normal,” he said, and Slonda would have liked to hit him for that sentence if he had the strength. “It happens to all of us the first times we travel through the barrier we spent so long believing was impenetrable.”

Slonda slowly raised his head.

“Where am I.”

Drinda looked at him.

“In Tandor.”

“But…”

“Only at a very different point in time,” Drinda said calmly. “Much earlier than you are used to. I am trying to make it comprehensible.”

He set his bowl down, took a deep breath, and focused. In the darker patch of shade beneath the oak, a bright point appeared first, barely more than a grain of light suspended in the air. Then a second. Then more. Slonda blinked. At first he thought it was afterimages, remnants of those milky, flickering states that had accompanied him since the crossing, but then he understood that what was forming before him was not merely light, it was an ordered representation. A sun. Another. Moons. Planets. The system as he knew it from the star charts, only not as a drawing or a model of wood and metal, but free in space, floating, alive, threaded with inner light.

Drinda went on speaking, and as he spoke the bodies moved.

“What we take for linear flow,” he said, “for the calm, necessary progression of energy in only one direction, is not wrong. But it is incomplete. It is only the perspective of a being that lives bound to a place and to a sequence, and from that makes a rule that sounds larger than it is.”

Slonda watched the planets and moons circle the suns. He saw the world. He saw the configuration as he knew it, from the time he came from. Then it began to change. Not chaotically. Not in jumps. It ran backward.

At first slowly.

He saw Maohanga, the twin planet, on that similar orbit familiar to him from older tablets, and now it was no longer approaching in the familiar calculations with every cycle a nuance farther toward its inner passage, not in that long, majestic drift where its distance to the world still sat at roughly three hundred and thirty degrees and only changed across vast spans. No. It was retrograde. He saw Maohanga moving toward a different relationship to the world, the angle growing, running toward one hundred and eighty degrees, faster at first, then slower again, as if everything were converging on another point of rest, on a position that lay before his own understanding of time. The other planets moved accordingly. Jonsus too, in a way Slonda did not grasp at once, because he had never learned to read Jonsus as truly part of the same grand dynamic.

Drinda pointed to the new position.

“Here,” he said. “Here is where you are now. Relative to that. Relative to the time you came from.”

Then he began to speak of energies, of transitions, of the concept of time as mere progression of motion, of relative position in space, of layers that overlap not only spatially but temporally, of passages into other rooms and other strata of the same world. Slonda listened as long as he could, but very quickly it became too abstract, too complicated, too far from any familiar intuition. Beneath the oak’s shade, Drinda expanded the view farther outward. The single system shrank and others joined it, suns among suns, systems in patterns, motions relative to one another, all moving away from the center, all in relationships no single drawing could have captured. Slonda understood enough to sense that in this thinking time was no longer something that simply passes, but something that emerges from relationships.

Drinda continued.

Slonda, however, reached a point where his mind could no longer absorb, it could only register that it was overwhelmed.

At last he lifted his hand, more groping than decisive.

“Why am I here.”

Drinda let the display contract. The suns and planets lingered a moment longer like pale ghosts in the shade beneath the oak.

“You were chosen.”

“By whom.”

“By the School of Time.”

Slonda stared at him.

“I have never heard of it.”

“That is not surprising,” Drinda said. “Thousands of years ago we decided to withdraw from the linear.”

He indicated the position in the model at about sixty degrees.

“Roughly there this decision began, if one wants to simplify it like that. We distributed ourselves through time. We are not many, and it makes little sense to follow time in a straight line if you want to recognize larger patterns and understand the boundaries.”

“There are boundaries,” Slonda said at once. “What do you mean.”

Drinda nodded as if he almost welcomed the question.

“We cannot travel freely into every time. Something remains closed to us.”

Now he pointed to two other positions in the model, roughly thirty degrees and three hundred and thirty degrees.

“We can neither jump before that point, nor beyond the point you come from. Not before there. Not after there. It is not possible for us. We do not know how.”

“Why.”

Drinda smiled faintly.

“You must be very confused. I was too.”

“Where from,” Slonda asked, and even as he spoke he felt how small the question sounded beside what stood before him.

Drinda indicated a position around ninety degrees.

“I come from there. But for us that is actually irrelevant.”

Slonda dragged a hand over his face.

“I… The Codex.”

Drinda nodded.

“It has been rewritten again and again, Slonda. Little is known of the time before that position there.”

He pointed again toward the vicinity of thirty degrees.

“Only that chaos reigned. War. Destruction. Death. Free magic. And that the founding of the schools, the writing of the Codex, and the binding of magic to it saved the world and pushed the free back. That is at least the grand, simple version.”

He paused briefly.

“And then the Codex changed repeatedly across the millennia. Spells were forgotten. Some were made to be forgotten. Schools were forgotten, merged into others, or fell in an inquisition because they reached too far toward power. All of that, my Master Slonda…”

With his hand he traced the long span between thirty and three hundred and thirty degrees.

“…is tens of thousands of years in which so much was lost, rewritten, cleansed, destroyed, or renamed that even we know some things only in layers. And now you are here, at the beginning of another order, and you will learn the things as we all had to learn the history, and the rules that bind us. Because we too must follow the Codex.”

After that they were silent a long time.

Very long.

The illusion of the system still floated before them, smaller now, calmer, almost only a moving afterimage, while Slonda began to sort. At first by feeling, then with the old, nearly habitual sharpness that had always saved him whenever his temperament was already dissolving. He analyzed. Ordered. Separated shock from statement, statement from inference, inference from speculation. He began to realize. Not fully. But enough to develop a first weak shape of understanding. The world was not broken. It was shifted. And if it was shifted, there were rules by which it could be shifted.

An eternity later, or a quiet stretch that felt like one, he raised his head again.

“If I change something here,” he said slowly, “do I not change everything. All sequences.”

Drinda smiled.

“You grasp quickly.”

Slonda did not allow himself pride. Only a tense shadow crossed his face.

“No,” Drinda said calmly. “That is not the case. Everything you do here has already happened in your future. You move relative to time, not against it. Every step you will take here is already part of the world in the future you come from. You do not step outside the order. You only move in a layer you did not know before.”

Slonda said nothing.

Drinda looked at him, and for the first time something like delighted sharpness entered his voice.

“Who do you think prepared the spells you found in the library. Who hid the information from your younger self, who censored the books. Who do you think attacked you back then with an aversion in the catacombs, you, your brother, and the mistress.”

Slowly, almost unwillingly, Slonda lifted his hand and pointed at Drinda.

“No, my old friend,” Drinda said, and now he truly laughed, not loud, but with a pleasure that came from a joke only he fully understood in that moment. “That was you yourselves.”

XIV

Gudi woke with a dry mouth and a taste on her tongue as if she had swallowed dust and kept silent for too long. For a moment she did not know where she was. Only that she was dizzy, that her body lay heavy on a narrow cot, and that something inside her still wanted to flee in panic, even though she had not fully opened her eyes yet.

It was dark.

Not completely. Somewhere out in the corridor a light was burning, warm and muted, and when she blinked and turned her head a little, she saw the open door and beyond it stone walls lying in that unsteady half darkness that makes rooms feel larger and stranger than they are. The floor was not wood or tiles, but packed sand, which made the cold from the stone even more noticeable. Gudi pushed herself half upright and immediately felt along herself, arms, legs, belt, hair, as if she first had to check whether she was still whole.

She was uninjured.

No fetters. No wound. No pain, apart from the pounding pressure behind her eyes and a nausea lodged somewhere deep in her stomach.

Then she heard voices.

Distant at first, indistinct, more sound than meaning, then footsteps. Closer. More even. Not rushing, not searching, but on their way to her. Gudi froze. Without thinking she let herself sink back down again, turned her face to the wall, closed her eyes, and pretended to be asleep. She held her breath as long as she could and forced herself not to twitch even a finger.

The footsteps came closer.

They reached the door.

Then silence.

A short, dreadful silence in which she thought her heart must be beating loudly enough to be heard out in the corridor. A noise followed, perhaps a soft scrape, then murmuring in the singing language of the Sondra, gentle and incomprehensible. A brief whistle. Then footsteps again.

One.

Two.

Three.

They had come toward her.

Gudi squeezed her eyelids shut tighter until everything shimmered behind them. Her heart almost stopped.

Silence again.

Then a sound she could not place, neither word nor sign, more like a click of the tongue. One more step. Then another.

Away from her.

They could have touched her now, woken her, hauled her up by the hair, or slit her throat, and yet the footsteps moved away. Away from the cot. Toward the door. Voices. Then only the fading sound of sand under soles, slowly dying in the corridor.

The door remained open.

Gudi waited.

A minute.

Then another.

Then many more, at least it felt that way. Only when her lungs began to ache from the forced shallow breathing and her muscles trembled from lying so still did she sit up carefully. She did not dare move much, she only listened. Nothing. No step. No murmuring. No breathing except her own.

Slowly she got up and went to the door.

She stopped in the frame and peered around the corner.

A corridor lay ahead of her, lit by round light spheres on the walls, and for a moment she did not understand what she was seeing because her mind, by instinct, had been looking for torches. But these lights did not flicker. They threw no smoke, no trembling shadows, only a steady pale glow, cool and perfectly even. She had only rarely seen such spheres, only in the hands of some magicians who conjured them for moments, never simply like this, calm, set into wall brackets, as if light here were something you stored the way other people stored oil.

Where am I, she thought.

Still under the gardens, she guessed, somewhere in a part no one on the surface knew, in a hidden substructure whose size she had never imagined. No one was in the corridor. No sound. No moving shadow.

She started running.

Not blindly, not recklessly, but fast and crouched, in the direction from which she had last heard the footsteps. Again and again she stopped, always ready to spring back, but there were no real hiding places here. The corridor was too clean, too clearly built, the walls too smooth, the corners too open. Soon she reached a room, empty, bright, with several passages leading off. She cautiously stuck her head into the first, then into the second, listened, saw nothing. She had to get out. Raise the alarm. Find someone. Gnok, the thought shot through her, and the name hit her almost physically. Gnok had betrayed her. Or worked with them. Or done something that could no longer be called harmless in any way. Someone had to help her. Her brother. Suddenly she thought of Morgut, of his hands, of the way he always laughed first and acted second, and panic rose in her, hot and completely useless.

She forced it down.

Breathe. Think. Do not fall apart now.

One of the corridors led into a kind of stairwell. Stairs up. Stairs down. She did not hesitate long. The city had to be up, where else. So she ran.

Up one flight.

Then another.

Then another landing.

She met no one. Each time she stopped and listened. Nothing. No call behind her. No alarm. Only her own breath and the dull hammering of her pulse. Up again. The stairwell was darker than the corridors had been, the light spheres fewer, and the climb did not seem to end. Another level. Another landing. More steps. How deep under the earth had she been. How long had she slept. How far did this underground realm reach.

At last she stood in a hall.

Large. Empty. Dark at the edges. No one in it. No furniture. Only sand on the floor and walls rising so smoothly into height that they almost looked natural, as if cut from rock that had always been waiting for this room. Ahead of her a gate stood open, and through it sunlight fell.

Sun.

Brightness.

Rescue.

Hope, in that moment, was not a thought but a leap. Gudi forgot every caution, every calculation, every possibility that an open gate might be open precisely because someone knew she would run through it. She rushed toward it, with a cry for help already half formed on her lips, and stepped outside.

Sand.

Nothing but sand.

Dunes.

Sun.

Desert.

The cry died in her throat before it even became sound. For a moment she stood completely still, as abruptly as if someone had held her by the back. Then she turned slowly.

Behind her there was simply an opening in the sand.

Not even a gatehouse. No visible building. No temple, no ring of walls. Only a dark cut in the dune slope, a hole in the world she had just climbed out of. The shock hit her almost harder than the hall below. She froze briefly. Then she crouched at the edge of the dune again, half from instinct, half from the need not to stand openly in the sun like an animal offering itself to be shot.

Then the panic finally came.

Not the cold, thinking kind, but the stupid, hot, running kind.

She ran.

At least she was outside. At least not under the earth anymore, not in those corridors, not between the silent lights and hidden doors. Where she was running, she did not know. What she was thinking, even less. The sun was mercilessly bright, the air dry and sharp, and after the first steps she felt how badly the body of a city girl is suited for flight in open desert. Yet the sheer space, the breadth, the sky above her, all of it felt like freedom, and she clung to that.

On top of a dune stood a Sondra.

Long white cloak. Face veiled. Bow drawn. The arrow already on the string. He had watched her the entire time. He smiled. Not wide. Not openly cruel. More with that brief, almost private satisfaction of a man who feels confirmed and is now only waiting for the right moment. He drew the string a little farther back.

Not yet, he thought. A little more. The distance is too easy.

He let her run a bit farther.

Then, just as his fingers were about to release, a voice came from the side.

“Tropil. Do you really think you can just let her escape and then shoot her during the flight.”

The hiss with which he breathed out sounded almost like a curse. Beside him stood the leader, tall, wrapped in the same pale cloth, only finer, quieter, and she looked at him with amber eyes, disapproving, but not entirely without amusement. In that look there was even something like acknowledgment, though only for the audacity of his plan, not for its execution.

Tropil startled so badly the arrow slipped half off the string.

“I promised my friend Gnok,” the leader said calmly, almost too calmly, “that nothing would happen to her. And you want to make me, what, break my word.”

Tropil looked at her. She did not look away.

“Three days more, Tropil,” she said. “Three days you will endure watching this girl without anything happening to her. Only three more days.”

Tropil sighed. Deeply. Very audibly. He lowered the arrow and stowed the bow with an expression as if he had been sentenced to a task beneath him.

“Let her run,” the leader said, looking down at Gudi, who by now was stumbling far below between the dunes, too fast, too straight, too clueless. “She will not get far. She is running in the wrong direction, has no water with her, and it is unbearably hot. Collect her again tonight.”

She was already turning away, without waiting for an answer.

Then she stopped once more.

“You are not going alone. I think I will find someone to accompany you. So that no accident happens after all.” Her voice turned a little colder. “She will not be killed. I hope I have made myself unmistakably clear.”

Tropil did not answer at once. He only sighed again, this time quieter, with an expression somewhere between irritation, resignation, and wounded vanity. Babysitter, he thought. And now he was getting a babysitter himself. An excellent plan. He should have shot faster.

XV

Shara and Anadar were standing on deck when Roto arrived on board with his carpet.

It was one of those rare moments when they both showed themselves up top at all, not because they craved company, but because the river, in its last great bend before the open sea, had taken on something of that silent vastness that makes even people with worries lift their heads for a moment. The ship cut through brown, heavy water that had come down from the highlands and still carried the violence of the snowmelt inside it, and above everything hung a sky that was no longer truly winter, yet full of a cold brightness that held nothing warm. Then suddenly something glided through the air above the deck, first only an absurd movement at the edge of the eye, then clear enough that even seasoned sailors turned and stared like children at a fair.

Roto came on the carpet.

Shara saw him first, then looked to Anadar, and they needed no words to know what both of them thought in the same instant. This would not make anything easier. One more observer. One more man who would feel called to read patterns, to pass judgments, to interpret the situation in whatever light was available to him. Another man from whom one would have to hide parts of the truth, if one did not want those parts to become something in the wrong hands that could not later be contained.

Shara glanced over to Son.

The water mage was on deck as well, her hands calm on the rail, her face as controlled as ever, and yet Shara saw, in the smallest shift of her gaze, that she too was not pleased by Roto’s appearance. The Water School wanted to keep things small, shielded, handled among themselves, not because it was necessarily evil, but because it knew exactly how quickly an unclear incident could become the subject of an inquisition. In that context, Roto was not simply a visitor. He was a risk.

By now Morgut had come up as well.

Anadar reached his mind toward him so casually it looked like nothing more than a brief glance from the outside. In the same moment, Shara felt she had made the very same motion. They heard him almost at once, cursing.

“Could you both please stop talking into my head at the same time.”

Shara nearly smiled. So he had noticed.

But Morgut did not lose the beat. On the contrary, it was as if he snapped into his best form in precisely that moment. He spread his arms wide, as though he meant not only to greet Roto but also the whole river, the ship, and his own astonishing persuasiveness in the same gesture.

“Master Roto, how wonderful to see you here. How unexpected your arrival. An extremely elegant landing, truly worth seeing. I will tell everyone who is willing to hear it. A true master of the carpet. How are things in Ashambrat. And above all, what news do you have about my sister.”

In that radiant charmer’s way he did not only wrap himself around Roto, but in the same motion around Grot as well, who in every new situation immediately tried to claim the better overview. Morgut handed out flattery the way other people handed out bread, generous, seemingly without calculation, and precisely because of that it worked. He made men listen to themselves, and while they did, they forgot their questions.

“You know Master Grot, of course,” he went on, as if this were the most natural meeting in the world. “A mage of such reputation. And may I introduce Master Shara. You certainly know Master Anadar.”

In that moment Shara turned away and rushed to the rail.

The retching came hard and sudden. Not like ordinary seasickness, not like a slow unease you can feel coming, but like a grip from the inside that folded her without warning. She vomited, and while she still braced herself against the railing, she heard Morgut behind her continuing to speak, unshaken, shining, not even a heartbeat out of rhythm.

“They are not feeling particularly well on board. This rolling. They are not used to it.”

It was a good lie.

Anadar was at her side before the last words had faded.

“Are you all right.”

Shara wiped her mouth and forced a weak smile. “Yes. Probably just the ship.”

They used the distraction Morgut had created and disappeared below deck. The ship only rocked mildly, and Shara realized on the first steps that the nausea receded as quickly as it had come. They shared a cabin, small, cramped, but private enough that Anadar could do what he would otherwise have had to hide from other eyes. Shara sat on her bunk and waited a moment. She already felt better.

“Better already,” she murmured. “I should have eaten breakfast.”

Anadar remained standing by her for a moment. He was briefly worried, she could see it, but since she recovered quickly, that other trait in him returned as well, that dark concentration she had come to know too well. He wanted to get further. Further with Naaarstr. Further with the signs, the formulas, the small shifts at the edges of his knowledge. Between him and the demon in the sword something had developed that Shara disliked and yet could no longer grasp simply as danger. It was not only temptation. Not only corruption. It had become a kind of relationship, in which both circled each other, tested, instructed, restrained, and slowly recognized that the other had needs, claims, and rules that could no longer be dismissed with disgust alone.

She stayed with him.

Not only because, with ship travel and watch rotations, she had little better to do anyway, but because she did not want him to slide too far down into a world closed to her. She guarded the door of the small cabin physically so no one would burst in at the wrong moment and see what he was doing there, and at the same time she watched his mind. Not unceasingly, not with force, but the way one watches a sleeper one knows walks along precipices in his dreams. If it became necessary, she wanted to be ready.

Anadar sat down on the floor.

In front of him he placed the sword. Then he took chalk and began to draw symbols onto the planks. First small forms, then more interlaced ones, lines Naaarstr dictated to him, not in words the way a teacher dictates to a student, but in images, impulses, a knowledge that wanted to go into the hand before it could be translated into sentences. Later he wrote the same forms onto parchment, beside them simpler spells of the Fire School, cleansing, illusions, the basic structures of banishment and binding, as if he wanted to lay the two strands of knowledge against one another and see where they touched, where they contradicted each other, and where between them there was a gap in which something new could grow.

So the day passed.

And as Shara watched him, the situation felt strangely familiar. It was like back then in the tower of the Fiery Fortress. Learning, practicing, understanding, the study of a discipline that did not yet obey him and for that very reason pulled him deeper. Back then she had often stood beside him in silent admiration, almost hungry for his recognition, sunk into the wish to be seen by him, not merely as a student, not merely as one among many. Now she sat by him again, only the roles had shifted. Now it was not admiration alone. Now she was the one keeping watch over him.

While she did that, she let her mind drift across the ship.

She could do that well, and had for a long time. Not as crude intrusion, but as sensing, as touching the surfaces of other consciousnesses, as perceiving tensions, colors, densities. She looked for the others. She found Miene and Siendra first, both well shielded, both grown wiser in the art of not leaving the self lying around in the open, and yet readable enough for her. Between them stretched that strange mixture of rivalry and mutual necessity, of teasing and trust. Both were in love with Morgut in their own ways, and both knew it of each other. Both amused Shara more than she wanted to admit.

Then Morgut himself.

The young man is growing up, she thought, and she liked it. The way he lulled Roto and Grot, the ease with which he made two older masters trade vigilance for flattery, fascinated her. He played the carefree one so well that many forgot how much attention it took. And at the same time he avoided Miene and Siendra just as deftly, let neither of them pin him down, and yet enjoyed the fact that both desired him. He liked them both. He did not love them. Not yet. Perhaps he would never be that foolish. Shara had to laugh, very softly, only for herself.

Then Son and Indra.

Both closed off. Both unpleasantly touched by the thought that the monster was still out at sea. Both unpleasantly touched by the possibility that all of this was a violation of the code. Both with the deep wish to make the matter undone, reversed, invisible, especially to men like Roto. All right, Shara thought, that will not be difficult. These two wear their guilt like a veil, and a veil is something experienced eyes can see through.

Roto and Grot felt almost like relief.

Two men. Masters. Power conscious. Educated. Convinced of their own sharpness. Both considered themselves hard to deceive. Both, in their masculinity, were astonishingly limited, easier to distract than they would ever admit. Shara smiled. That was not so complicated. Only unpleasant.

And then Isidre.

Isidre, the healer, whom she liked more with every day. Shara almost instantly loved this woman because there was nothing malicious in her, no little barb, no need to shrink the other with clever words. She offered help wherever she saw help was needed, and in that lay a strength that in other schools would have been mistaken for naivety. Shara missed her conversations with her, though the journey was not yet long enough to speak of missing in any serious sense. Isidre did not stay long in the company of Roto, Morgut, and Grot. She withdrew as soon as they met again on deck and almost always sought the other women. Shara could not blame her.

Just as Shara wanted to bring her attention back to Anadar, she felt something else.

A presence.

Warm, fine, bright, almost like a scent in the mind.

“Mother.”

The answer did not come as an external word, but as a gentle touch that felt like voice.

“My love. You have become very fine. You are practicing.”

Shara straightened inwardly. “What are you doing here.”

“I am only checking on you. How you are.”

Then, even softer,

“How you are, my daughter.”

Shara smiled despite herself. “That is kind.”

But even as she answered, she felt the presence already fading. No farewell. No full retreat. More like light that had fallen through a window and now drew back because the angle changed.

The day passed.

Anadar slept hardly at all. He focused on his visitor with a persistence Shara recognized in her bones. He had found something new. Something he did not understand. Something that challenged him. She knew this trait in him better than anyone. It was the same thing that had made him great, and the same thing that could ruin him if no one touched him at the right moment. She watched him, as she always had.

As evening came, she excused herself and pretended nausea again. She excused Anadar’s absence as well. It troubled her a little that they might be attacked, but the three water mages assured her they would keep watch in turns and repel any assault. Roto asked no questions about the sea creature. He accepted it as given, as if he had already decided his mere presence was a kind of answer.

Shara fell asleep.

When she woke the next morning and sat up, she saw Anadar still there where he had sat in the night, drawing chalk symbols on the floor, unmoving except for the hand that slowly, tirelessly traced lines.

The nausea struck suddenly.

Worse than the day before. Not creeping, not simple discomfort. She swallowed, sprang up, and only just made it to the deck before she bent over the rail again. The sea was calm now. They had long since left the racing river and were under sail, gliding over an almost uncanny smooth surface that only breathed silver in the early sun. The ship barely rolled. So it was not that. She knew it in that instant already, while she was still retching and the wind threw spray into her face.

When it was over, she leaned heavily against the rail and let the cold dampness strike her skin and lips. She recovered too quickly. That was what made it frightening.

When she turned to go back below and finally find something to eat, Isidre was standing behind her.

She smiled.

Not surprised. Not curious. More with that gentle certainty only healers have when they have read something long before the other person has even understood it is readable.

Affectionately she took Shara in her arms. Not tight. Only enough that Shara felt the support. Then she brushed a hand over Shara’s cheek.

“Let us find something for breakfast.”

XVI

The ship no longer sat quite as well in the water.

Kral felt it from the very first day, hardly had the familiar islands behind them shrunk into smaller, greenish lines in the haze. The hull worked harder, took the sea more dully, more sluggishly, with that faintly offended heaviness of a ship that is floating again but knows very well it is no longer what it once was. It was slower, it answered the rudder later, and even when the wind was kind, it lacked that living readiness with which a healthy ship bites into its sails and suddenly becomes more than wood and rope and planks. But Kral did not let it trouble him overly. It made headway. That was enough. A ship does not have to be proud. It only has to carry.

The first day passed, then the second. The wind was not always for them, but it was not truly against them either. It shifted, once too weak, then again unpleasantly hard, but never so much that Kral seriously feared slipping back into that state where survival alone devours every other thought. So he held strictly west, not entirely sure where that line would end, but sure enough that it would eventually lead him into known waters, to known coasts, to some river mouth, some harbor, some point where one could turn a patched ship back into money, and money into a future.

With each night the moons stood fuller in the sky.

The tides grew mightier. Kral had expected that, and yet at sea it always felt different, more immediate, more bodily, than words could ever quite catch. The waves were not only higher or broader, they had more pull in them, more weight, as if something deeper were drawing at them, something that had begun working days before the actual Three Crowns. The sea grew restless, even when it was not always rough. And again and again Kral thought he heard that mad singing. Not clearly. Never long enough to lift his head and say, there, now it is back. More like something that slipped between wind and rigging, a distant, hollow song that was gone the next moment, as if the sea itself had tried it briefly and then discarded it.

His two foreign guests stood often on deck.

Or at least, whenever he consciously thought of them. That was perhaps the most unpleasant thing about them, that he had to actively remember their presence, otherwise they slipped from his perception with an astonishing ease. It was not truly invisibility. No spell that removed them. Much more a kind of tilt in the gaze, as if the eye did not want to hold them. Sometimes they stood together by the rail, their long, slender bodies motionless against the pale light of the moons, and when Kral turned away only briefly to give an order or check the sails, on looking back there was suddenly only one of them, exactly where both had stood a moment before. Then later they were both there again, as if nothing had happened in between.

Kral was a pragmatic man.

He did not think about most things longer than they were useful. As long as they sailed, as long as the ship held, and no one lay at night with a slit throat between the barrels, he did not ask too many questions. Questions rarely change the current, and they do not patch wood.

After the fifth night they passed a small group of islands.

At that time Kral himself stood at the stern, his gaze half on the water, half on the sky, and he needed a long moment before the outlines touched something in him that was more than mere memory. Low backs in the sea. A few jagged rocks. Dark, slanted lines of scrub. Then he understood that these must be the Fint Archipelagos, or at least islands so like them that he allowed himself to believe in familiarity. From that moment on he knew roughly where they were. Or he imagined he did. At sea even imagination can be valuable, as long as it keeps the hand steady.

From that moment he thought more clearly of the future again.

With this ship to the Great Market, as far as the river would allow, or at least to some landing where one could still sell the wreck with a certain pathos as a seaworthy vessel. Get as much for it as possible. Then see. A teamster, he thought more than once, might be quite lucrative too. Less water. Less depth. Above all fewer ship sized monsters that rise from the sea and treat ships like nutshells. He would not have minded spending a few years seeing only oxen, wheels, and mud spattered roads.

He estimated they still needed three days to reach the mouth.

If his assumption about the islands was correct. If the currents did not conspire against him. If the sea did not decide, in the last hours, to show him how little its temporary mildness was worth. Again his gaze slid to the two strangers standing on deck and staring out to sea as if waiting for something not meant for other eyes. Again, for a heartbeat, there was the singing, or Kral imagined it. Then he saw one of the two leap into the water.

At full speed.

Without a call. Without haste. Simply with a motion as if stepping over the rail were not a break but only a transition from one ground to the next.

The singing stopped.

Kral snapped his head around. Had he imagined it. He looked back, but in that same moment the makeshift mast groaned under a harder gust, and the captain’s instinct swept every other perception aside for a moment.

“Reef the sails,” he barked.

The men sprang to the lines. Cloth cracked. Rope tightened. The ship slowed, reluctant but obedient. Kral supervised the movement with a sharp eye, half his body already pulled back into what could be grasped and ordered.

When he looked again, both strangers stood on board.

Still.

As if none of them had jumped into the water at all.

Kral shook his head. Perhaps his eyes were playing tricks on him. Perhaps fatigue was at work. Perhaps none of this was good, and he simply lacked the right language for it. So he thought of the ship again. He had to be careful. He did not want only to arrive in one piece. He wanted to squeeze a little start capital from the sale. A man without a ship and without money is a man suddenly dependent on inventions, and inventions cost strength.

The starry sky was slowly becoming more familiar to him.

That helped, too.

At the same time, far inland and then back along the river, Kolnidranooora had at first not been sure what to do.

When Roto had boarded the ship and the sail had carried off with the current, he had stood on the bank, waited, hoped, cursed, and hoped again until dusk made hope into something ridiculous. Then he began laying out his options. Via the Great Market. Straight on. Down the coast. Or better, to the river mouth, because if Roto would bring the ship to a halt anywhere, then it would be out there, where the current no longer tore raggedly through the land but opened into the sea. That is what I would do, Kolnidranooora thought. And since brotherhood, even among magicians, sometimes only means that you trust the other man with the same kind of improvisation you trust in yourself, he decided to ride to the mouth.

It was easier than he expected.

The road along the river was well built. Here horses and oxen normally hauled ships upstream when water level and cargo allowed. So there were roads, inns, rest stops, small villages where one could already hear the slap of rigging on land. Kolnidranooora rode swiftly, without great worry, the weather improved, and with each night the moons stood brighter in the sky, almost so bright one might think it was daylight, only duller, as if seen through fine cloth. He thought the coming nights would be unpleasant for sleeping. Too much light, too much expectation in the air.

Then he heard the sea in the distance.

And there, truly there, lay a ship at a harbor at the river mouth, so waiting, so ready to cast off, that Kolnidranooora needed no further proof. That had to be Roto. Who else. He spurred his horse and rode down to the quay, all but jumped from the saddle while still moving, tossed the reins to a bewildered boy who was spreading nets, and ran up the gangplank onto the ship.

It took Kral a little longer to reach the mouth.

When it opened before him, he understood at once where the real problem lay. It was spring. Early spring. The snowmelt had set in. The river he had planned to take upstream carried too much water, too much force, too much debris. In this state he would not bring a ship up there in the coming weeks. Not this ship. Not with this stern. Not with this makeshift mast. It was unpleasant, yes. But in that moment he did not truly care, as long as they had made it through that god damned sea unscathed and had not been sunk, for whatever reason. So he decided to wait here at the mouth until the river became navigable again. He ordered them to dock and moor the ship.

At that exact moment a foreign man stepped onto the deck.

He moved oddly. Too straight. Too sure. Too much like someone who expects space to yield to him. Kral immediately pegged him for a magician.

“Tell me,” the stranger demanded without preamble, “where is Master Roto.”

The crew looked at one another in confusion and then to the captain.

“Who,” Kral asked. “I don’t know any Roto.”

Kolnidranooora understood instantly that this must be the wrong ship, and as practiced men do in unpleasant situations, he changed tactics without a visible pause.

He drew himself up to his full height.

“I am Master Kolnidranooora of Ashambrat,” he said imperiously. “And I demand to be taken to Gontar.”

It was one of those sentences that might have had effect in a council chamber or among students, but on an improvised, patched ship full of exhausted sailors it sounded more like an invitation to send someone straight to hell. Kral was about to do exactly that. His mouth was already open, a curse on his tongue, when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

The male of the two strangers was there.

Not from the front. Not announced. He had slid soundlessly in behind the magician, so fast, so fluid, that the motion seemed more like a leap from water than a step on planks. It was a single gesture. No hesitation. No struggle. The blade drove from behind straight across Kolnidranooora’s throat, deep, clean, irreversible.

The magician’s eyes flew wide.

Blood spilled at once over his chest, dark and rich, in an amount that makes every word ridiculous. He tried to speak, produced only a gurgling sound, and then collapsed dead onto the deck, still half trying to clamp both hands to the wound.

No one moved.

Kral stood frozen. The crew as well. Even the men who had seen death before, and that was nearly all of them, stared in that first second only in silence at the corpse and the stranger who had made it, because the speed and coldness of it had stolen the rhythm from any familiar reaction.

The stranger stepped onto the dead man.

With a contempt so casual it seemed not even meant for the man, but for the fact that he had been lying in the way at all. Then he spat on him. The female stranger was already beside him, and before any sailor could find the decision for a sound, a question, or a weapon, both of them leaped overboard into the sea.

Just like that.

As if water were not an obstacle, but a homecoming.

Formularbeginn

XVIIFormularende

The crossing to the Islands of the Winds was, at first, so uneventful that even the most vigilant on board eventually began to distrust the calm.

The river carried them out, the sea received them, and beyond that first shift from brackish water to salt, beyond the small acclimation to the fact that the world under the keel now breathed differently than it did between the banks, nothing happened for a while. No storm. No shadow beneath the ship. No song that stayed long enough to be named with certainty. The days slid into one another, held together by watches, meals, conversations, and the small routines on board, and precisely this quiet order felt unsettling, as if it were only the smooth surface of a water beneath which something larger had decided, for the moment, to remain still.

Anadar withdrew further and further.

Not visibly in one grand gesture, but step by step, hour by hour, until Shara could no longer say whether he slept at all or merely sank into states that resembled sleep closely enough to still the body while the mind was elsewhere. She watched him closely and still found that there was no immediate danger. She could call him back at any time. That was the comforting part, and the disturbing part as well. It meant he was still reachable. It also meant he had truly gone far enough away that one had to fetch him. He was simply absorbed in studying, she told herself. Like before. Only this time the object of his study lived inside the sword, and it had a voice that demanded blood.

Summonings, Anadar explained to her, could not be performed on a ship. A moving object was too great an uncertainty. Circles, lines, symmetries, alignments, all of it required more reliability than a swaying cabin or a rolling deck could provide. So it would remain theory, and Shara was grateful for that. She was not even sure how much blood still remained in the master whose hand she or Isidre now had to treat again and again. The cuts never fully closed because new ones kept appearing, and that alone would have been enough to make her uneasy, even if she had not felt how hard Naaarstr was pulling at him. Isidre did not ask too many questions, which Shara found very pleasant. The red haired earth mage hardly left her side at times, and Shara found the company of another woman surprisingly soothing. She had rarely had women around her. Always only those mages of the Fiery Fortress, that mixture of pride, ambition, sharpness, and constant comparison. It could be exhausting. With Isidre there was none of that. Only the morning nausea remained unpleasantly reliable. Every morning Shara had to go to the rail and throw up before she was properly conscious and before the first bite of food. She fervently hoped it would stop once she was back on land.

Master Roto wanted, on the very first day after his arrival, to convince everyone to go to Gontar first and seek out Master Fontal.

He presented the idea with that calm only people possess who mistake their conviction for reason, and therefore assume that everyone else must also find it reasonable once it has been laid out properly. But his words fell on deaf ears. Not even Grot, who usually seized every opportunity to position himself on the side of reprimand or investigation, seemed particularly enthusiastic. He merely shrugged and promised to do it later. First, he said, in that tone where self evidence and condescension blended until they were almost indistinguishable, they had to arrive on the islands before the Three Crown. It was already difficult enough, with these tides, to catch the correct window to put in safely. After that they could still decide who to send to Gontar and for what purpose. Roto seemed to accept it, or at least pretended it was a conscious concession rather than a defeat. In any case he intended, immediately upon arrival, to speak with Mistress Sinadie. And quite certainly, he said with complete conviction, Kolnidranooora, whom he had left behind, would ride to Gontar without delay via the Great Market. Two birds with one stone. While Roto, with Grot at his side, would sway Sinadie, Kolnidranooora could win Fontal, and if both succeeded then Hokn'f would see that his dispatched master had indeed shown initiative. Roto thought these sentences so often and so firmly that they were almost readable on his face.

Morgut did not truly enjoy the crossing with the two older masters.

In his perception both were very taken with themselves and limited in precisely the way that passes for depth when no one has ever been forced to look their own boundary in the face. They discussed politics of the schools at length, procedures, jurisdictions, traditions, and the question of how to deal with Anadar. Not out of real antipathy, Morgut concluded after some time, but because Anadar was simply superior to them, in every fiber of his being, in every movement, every self possession, every depth from which he acted, and that frightened the little men in them. Otherwise the two masters knew very little about the world beyond their own schools and their polished self images. Morgut would have preferred to spend time with Miene and Sindra, yet the two of them kept their distance from Roto and Grot and therefore usually from him as well. That did not even bother him. He liked their affection and the rivalry between them. They had made him into a kind of trophy the winner would receive. Morgut knew it very well, but he did not want to make it easy for them. He could not truly decide himself. He enjoyed the attention. At least there was news from his sister Gudi. She had finally been given her own plot in Ashambrat and apparently was on the way to developing. It was about time. His thoughts drifted again and again to their shared childhood, to dusty courtyards, small games, and the look of his little sister who admired him the way younger siblings admire older brothers, before the world grows large enough to disturb that order. Meanwhile the two old masters had once again sunk their teeth into a topic about how one might convict Anadar politically or legally. Morgut smiled, nodded at the right places, and was inwardly somewhere else entirely.

Son and Indra kept watch on board, sometimes alternating, sometimes together.

Now and then Grot came and relieved them, yet they avoided the proximity of the arrogant mage whenever they could, and since he in turn preferred to spend time with Roto, these overlaps were rare. Roto and Grot reinforced each other in their being the way men do when each finds in the other the correct mirror for his own importance. During their watches Son and Indra could make out no sounds, no melody, none of those tones they had learned to fear, and for that they were sincerely grateful. They did not want to meet that monster on the open sea. Not at night. Not on a ship full of people who might be brave or powerful, but who did not know what it means when something rises from the deep that reacts to song and not to spells. The others in the group remained foreign to them in different ways. Anadar was unsettling to both. Not unpleasant, not at all. Simply a very powerful, intimidating man with an aura that could tear down rock. His presence, his movements, that incredible fullness of power, and yet everything under such control. Both agreed that an inquisition would have to prepare for an inquisition if anyone ever seriously decided to interrogate this man. He would flatten everything without even blinking. And as powerful as he seemed to them, he also seemed absent, as if he were working on something entirely different, as if only part of him were truly on board. Shara, by contrast, they admired. To them she was the upright, clever, watchful woman who held him without ever taking his space. They would have liked more time near her, but Shara was almost always either in the cabin with Anadar or with that kind hearted Isidre. That left Miene and Sindra, with whom they shared a cabin and slowly became friends, despite the palpable contest between the two young women, something that breathed at the edge of every conversation. It had something of sisters about it, only with more vanity.

The days to the islands passed, and two days before the Three Crown they put in at night.

The water stood high, far too high even the captain who brought them thought, and the darkness was bright in the way it only is when moons hang huge in the sky and every wave breaks open in silver. The group was assigned to one island. The ship itself was allowed to remain in the harbor with the crew on board, since the men refused to sail out again without protection. The island they were given had a tower in which all of them were housed, with the exception of Grot, who immediately invited Roto to his own tower and vanished with him almost as quickly. They wanted to go to Mistress Sinadie at once, which Anadar and Shara knew, but both first feigned exhaustion and asked to be allowed to rest. A wish one could not refuse exhausted guests. Son and Indra stayed with the group. They had not yet earned an island or their own tower, which in the context of the water school was less a humiliation than a sober fact. The island assigned to the group lay very close to Master Xoiun’s island with the burned out tower. From the shore one could already see the black, broken stumps standing against the bright night sky, as if charred fingers rose there into a world that refused to forget what had happened.

Hardly had they brought their baggage into the tower when Anadar turned to Son and Indra.

No detours. No attempt to disguise his wish as a request.

“Can you take us to the island tonight.”

It was more an order than a question.

Morgut and Shara accompanied the two water mages, while Miene, Sindra, and Isidre remained behind. They truly were tired, truly exhausted, and despite their curiosity even they understood that not everyone had to attend every nocturnal undertaking simply because Anadar wanted it. Son and Indra brought the three to a small boat that seemed to move by itself. It needed no rower. No visible sail. It simply glided over the water as if it knew the way better than any human on board. On another evening that alone would have delighted Morgut, but tonight he was too awake, too tense. They crossed and climbed the path to the tower whose upper end was missing, where only black stumps reached into the brightly lit night sky. They entered through the lower door. Son and Indra led them to the first floor where the parchments were kept. This level still seemed untouched. The actual destruction began one floor above.

Everywhere lay rolls, sheets, folders. On some were sequences of notes, on others explanatory sentences, on still others only symbols that looked more like magic than music. In one corner stood a keyboard instrument, a kind of piano, and beside it several flutes of different lengths and designs. It felt less like a scholar’s study and more like the workroom of someone who understood sound not as ornament but as a tool.

While Son and Indra began to explain, Morgut immediately started looking at everything more closely.

The melodies seemed like spells. Unfortunately many of them were not complete. Some parchments were burned, others survived only in fragments, still others were full of marginal notes as if someone had stopped mid attempt. A few rolls were written in ordinary script with comments and explanations. Protection and warding, Son said, pointing to one of the intact rolls. This was almost the only melody they had been able to save in full, the one that kept the monster away or at least pushed it back. Morgut began at once to play individual scraps of melody to himself. He sat at the instrument, tested the keys carefully, listened, then returned to parchment and keys again, like a young man suddenly needed at exactly the point his unruly curiosity had always secretly wanted to reach.

Anadar looked around.

Music was not his strength. He had never concerned himself with it. He recognized that this was a vessel, another way of channeling magic, that in intervals, repetitions, dissonances and resolutions there was apparently something far beyond mere art. But more than that did not open itself to him at first. He let his gaze travel through the room, upward, to the broken beams, tried to grasp what had happened here. And in that moment Naaarstr spoke to him. The voice came at once, cold and sharp, not as it usually did in the tone of a teacher or a tempter, but with a strange harshness he had never heard from it before.

These melodies, said the demon. They are. I do not like them. They hurt.

Anadar went still.

What.

They are not natural. They are foreign. Old. I do not like it.

It was one of those moments when Anadar might almost have felt amused, if the demon’s reaction had not been so plainly real.

There are voices, he thought back, that would claim the same about you.

Naaarstr fell silent for a moment.

Then the answer came quieter.

There is more here than it seems. I sense something. Something deeply evil. A crime was committed here. Very much pain. Very evil.

You sense it.

The walls are full of suffering. Something hangs over everything.

I sense nothing, Anadar replied. I perceive nothing.

At that moment Morgut played a few notes on the instrument, searching, testing, and yet Naaarstr recoiled so clearly that even Anadar involuntarily tightened his fingers around the sword.

That tone, said the demon. It hurts me.

For a heartbeat Anadar was tempted to ask Morgut to play the same sequence again. Not out of malice, but out of that cold curiosity with which he always watched reactions when they taught him something about an unknown system. But what came from Naaarstr then had nothing left of mere dislike.

That is foreign, Anadar. That is unnatural. Something was experimented with here that goes far beyond boundaries. Unthinkable things happened here. Cruel things. Unbelievably evil. With the intention to maim and to torture. It disgusts me. The room. The place. The music. Anadar, can we go, please.

The last word was almost a plea.

Anadar was so astonished by it that he immediately lifted his head and, with a small gesture, asked Morgut to stop.

Shara, who had watched him closely from the first step into this tower, saw at once that he was having another conversation.

Better, Anadar asked inwardly.

Yes, came the answer, tense, as if even the silencing of the tones were a relief. Even if the impression does not vanish. At least that music is no longer here. Anadar, evil ruled here. In this tower there is much more than you see. You must discover it. It is unbelievably terrible.

The demon in the sword was almost whining.

And that, perhaps, was the most unsettling thing about this place.

Then the door opened.

Mistress Sinadie stood in the frame, and in her eyes lay that irritated look of a woman who had harbored a suspicion, followed it, and was not even dissatisfied to have been right.

“I thought so,” she said. “That you would think of the task first before you so much as consider courtesies. You have always been one of those people who place no special value on the respect of protocol.”

She fixed her gaze on Anadar.

He looked at her and responded with a brief dip of his upper body and a bow that was half mocking, half charming, and because he could be charming when he wanted to be, the act almost seemed earnest.

He smiled at her.

“I thought that is why you brought us here. Not for conversation.”

Sinadie smiled back, stepped toward him, and held out her hand.

Anadar took it.

In the very same instant he asked, directly, without preface, without any cautious circling:

“What happened here. What are you hiding from us.”

XVIII

At first it was arduous.

Xian herself was tired, injured, and exhausted to the bone, and yet she had no time to yield to that exhaustion, because in the cabin in the forest there were two critically injured bodies, each of them demanding, in their own way, more attention than a single person could reasonably give. Nigk needed almost everything. The old bear’s claws had torn his chest open, and although Xiodri had stabilized him at the last moment, although herbs, salves, tinctures, and words whose meaning Xian did not understand had held his life in place, every hour at his bedside was an hour in which everything could have tipped again. Xiodri herself was badly hurt too. Not as immediately deadly as Nigk, no. Her wounds were different, less open, perhaps deeper, marked more by bites and crushed flesh than by one catastrophic blow, but serious enough that after the first feverish treatment of Nigk she barely had the strength to stay on her feet. She tended to him until her body refused the service, then she dragged herself to her own bed, pulled blankets over herself, and curled up inside them like an animal that instinctively knows that the first form of survival is sometimes nothing more than motionless endurance.

So everything else fell to Xian.

And she did what had to be done, at first almost without thinking, from that state where fatigue and duty fuse and a person moves from one task to the next because there is no room left between them for doubt. She boiled water, again and again, set heavy pots on the firestone, waited until it rolled, and sterilized bandages, rags, cloths, and knives as well as she could with boiling water and with a care that felt almost ridiculous to her, because she did not know whether it would be enough. She mixed salves according to the recipes of the strange woman who did not look old and yet seemed ancient, and who above all did not fit up here in the North, which for Xian might have been the strangest part of everything. She gathered wood, hauled it in, more and more of it, because this cabin in the forest was now the new camp and warmth inside it meant not comfort but life. She carried supplies from hut to hut, made a place for the horses, built herself a makeshift bedroll, and often slept only in short, hard stretches between water jug, bandage bowl, and half congealed ash.

She found the bear two days later in the forest.

It had bled out not far from one of the spruces where the fight still showed in deep claw marks and shredded bark. It lay on its side, enormous even in death, and at first Xian simply stood before it for a moment and looked at the heavy fur, the dark crusted blood, the maw that had almost taken everything from them. Then she nodded to it, as if that too were a kind of closing line, and got to work. She butchered it with the sober decisiveness that necessity can give a person. The hide, the fat, the meat, the bones, everything that could still be used was taken. From the bones she cooked soup, long and slow, with herbs from Xiodri’s stores and with the quiet thought that there might be a strange justice in it. What strength you took, you now give back.

Days passed.

And with the days the light changed. It became bright earlier. Evenings held on a little longer. Not much at first, but enough that Xian no longer had to gather wood in complete darkness. Nigk, too, began to have phases in which he stayed awake. At first only briefly, out of fever and pain, barely responsive, then longer, clearer, with that thin, pinched smile men put on when they want to pretend everything is far less terrible than the body already knows. He would keep massive scars on his chest. There was no doubt. They closed slowly, darkened, dried, pulled the skin tight, and often enough his face twisted when Xian or Xiodri changed the bandages, but he lived, and at some point that alone became a thought you could build on.

Xiodri’s wounds healed as well, strikingly fast.

The woman had salves, herbs, and knowledge that sped everything up in a way that rarely surprised Xian anymore, though each time she saw again that things were at work here that had little to do with ordinary healing. Still, it took weeks before Nigk could leave the bed again, weeks in which Xian had to run the entire household, and to her own surprise she did not even do it unwillingly. It kept her busy. As long as water had to be boiled, wood split, meat smoked, horses tended, or bandages washed, there was less room for the images of that night, for the bear, for the blood, for the fear of losing Nigk again under her hands.

The conversations with Xiodri remained unpleasantly impersonal.

Not unfriendly, no, but matter of fact, almost businesslike, as if even in the warmth of a shared cabin the woman still drew an invisible line between herself and any other being that was not herself. She spoke about herbs, about weather, about healing, about food, about firewood. Never about herself. Never from herself. At first Xian tried to steer the talk toward the refugees, toward the people who had left the North, toward the great silencing of the villages. It usually earned nothing more than a shrug.

People left for no apparent reason. They abandoned everything and went.

That was almost all Xiodri would give.

Why she herself had not been affected, she did not answer. Why she had stayed while others abandoned whole rows of houses, neither. Whether she had no friends who were gone now. No. Whether she missed no one. No. She managed well on her own. Why she had intervened in the fight, she left entirely unanswered, as if Xian had not spoken at all.

Nigk was more skilled at it, as always.

His questions were never direct. He never presented the sharp point first, instead he set the conversation softly, coaxed his counterpart, drew it into talking, guided it with a smile toward topics it did not even notice had been chosen. Here too he did that. Even when Xian was out fetching something, or splitting wood outside, he knew how to entangle Xiodri in conversations that began harmlessly and slowly edged closer to the core. But he too had little success. The woman stayed closed. Or she truly no longer knew. Or it simply did not matter to her. That might have been the most unsettling thing about her, that she did not merely seem to have secrets, but that those secrets apparently meant less to her than to anyone else.

With time they noticed it was getting warmer again.

Snow melted. Dark patches opened on the lakes. Streams broke free of ice and began to speak again. Roofs dripped. Paths that had been impassable for weeks slowly reappeared. All in all it was soon time to move on, and of course it was Nigk who grew impatient first. With every day he could walk more strongly, his desire to push farther north grew. It thawed now even during the day. It hardly snowed anymore. The air already carried that deceptive scent of departure.

Xiodri warned them.

Weather up here could turn quickly again, she said, as if she were personally acquainted with every mood of the North, and perhaps she was. But they decided to go farther north nonetheless. There were more villages, they assumed, more farms, more places where they could shelter. Xiodri confirmed it.

Then Xian and Nigk asked the witch to come with them.

At first half in earnest, half as a joke. She would know the land. She could point the way. And if it became too foolish for her, she could always turn into an owl and simply fly back. They laughed, and to their surprise, perhaps to her own as well, Xiodri agreed. Maybe she truly had grown tired of solitude. Maybe something in her had begun to move that had long been still. Maybe she wanted to see whether anything remained out there besides abandoned houses and snow.

So it happened that they set out ten days before the Tri Crown.

Nigk and Xian rode, Xiodri flew ahead of them, sometimes as an owl, later at times in other shapes as well, pausing here and there, waiting on a branch or a post, indicating the way with a gesture and guiding them forward safely like that. In the evenings they could often stay in abandoned farms, houses, or villages. The world seemed empty, but not dead. Doors stood open. Hearths were cold, but not collapsed. Fences hung crooked, but were not torn down. It was as if, in many places, someone had only just decided to leave and had never returned.

On the seventh day it went wrong.

Xiodri flew over a wooded stretch in the beginning dusk, and she was not as attentive as she should have been. Maybe she was tired. Maybe in the last few days she had grown too used to thinking of the sky above her and the silence beneath her as something that belonged to her. There was only a short distance left to the next village, a few kilometers, no more, and those last stretches are the most dangerous, because vigilance softens inside them.

The first black arrow came almost soundlessly.

Only at the very last second did she see the motion and wrench her wings around. The arrow skimmed past so close she felt the slipstream. Then a second. A third. Suddenly there was movement around her, in the branches, between the trunks, dark figures that did not quite seem to come from the forest itself and yet were there. Hands reached for her, nets perhaps, or merely shadows at the wrong angle. She flapped wildly, gained height, lost it, climbed again steeper, and it was probably only that seventh sense, the one that seems to grow out of nowhere in all shape shifters, that saved her.

In flight she changed.

Not back into her human form, there was no time for that, but into a raven. Smaller, faster, darker, better suited not to shine as a target in the dusk. Why had she not seen it coming. Why no warning, no feeling, no omen. All of that shot through her mind as she flew back as fast as she could. She knew they were following her. She felt it without looking back.

Then she saw Nigk and Xian.

On the path a little distance away, still unsuspecting, the horses grey and black between the trees in the last light. Xiodri shifted back in mid air and rolled in the snow before them, hard, ugly, almost more fall than landing.

“You have to get out of here. Turn back, now.”

She tried to drive them off, but it was already too late.

Her pursuers had followed close behind. Another black arrow hissed past and struck a tree behind them. Nigk and Xian leapt down from the horses, rolled, drew their weapons, but the moment of surprise was gone, and with it almost everything else.

They were surrounded.

Black shadows circled them, thin, elegant shapes in the dark, blades in their hands, fast, silent, uncanny. Yet they were not fog beings, not pure shadow. In the next breath Xian saw they had bodies, real bodies, black as night blind wood, smooth, muscular, powerful, and only the eyes were different, equally dark and yet with a different kind of sheen, as if something more alive than mere darkness lived there.

They attacked.

Steel struck steel. Nigk and Xian stood back to back as best they could and fought desperately. Xian’s sword worked fast and precise, Nigk, despite his not fully healed chest, with that stubborn viciousness that sometimes made him larger in a fight than he was. The foreign attackers pressed from all sides, withdrew, came again, quick, elegant, dangerous like beings who not only could fight, but were used to taking others apart in the dark.

Xiodri tried to change again and fly.

It was already too late.

A net dropped over her from the side, heavy enough to take wings, arms, shoulders at once. Then a dull blow to head or neck, and she slipped into darkness before she even understood who had struck her.

Nigk and Xian held out longer than was reasonable.

But against this superiority they were soon lost. It was not a crude mass that crushed them, but a kind of perfect, economical violence. They disarmed them slowly, almost methodically, knocked weapons from their hands, opened a guard, used an angle, stepped in, turned blades aside. One of the black attackers bled, then another, and in the flare of a strike Xian saw their blood fall red into the snow, just like hers. That did not make them less uncanny. Perhaps it made it worse.

In the end they lay bound in the snow.

Nigk gasping, Xian with arms burning, both half upright, unable to get up again at once. Around them the strangers spoke in a deep, gurgling language, with a rumbling vibration, as if it were formed lower in the body than human voices. Then they were hauled up. Hands seized them. Their eyes were covered, and perhaps they were thrown over horses or dragged to them, they could no longer be sure. The last thing Xian remembered before another blow sent her into unconsciousness was the feel of snow on her face and the dull knowledge that they had stumbled into something older and more organized than any abandoned cabin or any remnant of a fled village had ever suggested.

Epilog

Manador could hardly believe what he was reading at first.

The scrolls had been recovered as if someone had meant not merely to hide them, but to remove them from time itself. They had not been stashed carelessly, not thrown into a chamber in panic, but arranged, sealed, protected, laid in layers that suggested those who had done this knew exactly what they were withholding from the future. That alone had shaken him. What shook him even more was the content.

At first glance, part of the rolls was familiar. Known spells. Forms he could name. Calls of fire, purifications, banishments, protective circles, rites whose descendants were still taught in the Fiery Fortress to this day. Yet even where the underlying structure was recognizable, much was different. Some formulas felt rougher, more immediate, as if they came from a time when magic had been less tamed and therefore perhaps less reliable. Others, by contrast, seemed almost more dangerous in their simplicity, as if people back then had worked with forces not yet smoothed by centuries of testing, caution, and correction. Still other scrolls described variants that resembled modern spells the way an older, harder brother resembles the younger: less finely developed, less elegantly framed, and precisely for that reason perhaps more direct in effect.

Then there were those parchments that truly left him speechless.

Spells that were not about fire.

Not about heat, ember, or flame, not about burning, cleansing, or that proud, open violence on which the Fiery Fortress had always built its self image, but about light. Not merely in the metaphorical sense, not as a paraphrase for insight or visibility, but as its own clearly defined discipline. Light directed, refracted, amplified, focused, concealed, revealing and annihilating. Some formulas read like distant relatives of fire magic, as if both arts had once stood closer together before they split. Others were completely foreign to him, and that was what unsettled him. For foreign magic is not only unknown; it is always a silent accusation against whatever you had believed complete.

But even more interesting, and even more disturbing than the spells, were the other parchments.

The ones that contained no instructions, but history.

Manador sat over these writings for hours and felt his face harden the deeper he went. They were transcriptions of protocols, reports of sessions, records of disputes, registers of resolutions, expert opinions, petitions, witness statements, even records of inquisitions. At first he thought parts of it might be forgery or exaggeration, the late spite of a defeated faction that had fled into the shelter of archives and was now poisoning the past. But the more scrolls he opened, the more hands, styles, datings, and seals confirmed one another, the harder it became to believe in mere deceit.

There had once been more schools.

Not one or two forgotten side currents, not insignificant splinters tolerated at the margins of the Codex for a few decades and then absorbed again. No. According to these documents there had once been nine schools. Nine recognized, named, teaching schools. And among them, or rather right in their midst, the School of Light, which had also been located in the Fiery Fortress.

That thought alone was enough to make Manador let the scroll sink more than once and stare into nothing.

The School of Light. In the Fiery Fortress.

Not elsewhere. Not beyond a mountain range, not in a lost city, not in the shadow of some exiled order, but here, in the very place he had understood all his life as the center and origin of fire magic.

And this school had, the documents stated without any doubt, been subjected to an inquisition.

Not by foreign enemies. Not by a coalition of jealous outsiders. Above all by the fire magicians themselves.

He read the protocols of those sessions with growing unease. First the accusations, in the language of their time more cumbersome and yet in their core unpleasantly familiar. The light mages had become arrogant. They strove for a purity of magic that placed them above all others. They mixed insight with dominion. They carried within them a discipline too close to that of fire to be able to exist peacefully beside it. There were reports of quarrels in the halls, of competing claims to teaching, of questions about who was entitled to which parts of the Fortress, which rites might be performed in which rooms, which oath which students should swear. And then, gradually, disputes became charges.

The more reasonable ones, one of the sharpest texts said, had sided with the fire mages.

Manador read the sentence several times.

The more reasonable ones.

What a vile victor’s phrase, he thought. What a cold, self righteous word for people who had simply understood early enough which way the wind would soon blow. Whoever yielded was called reasonable. Whoever objected, obstinate. Whoever stayed, sensible. Whoever resisted, dangerous.

The light mages who bowed were integrated, examined, retrained, or demoted to lesser functions. The others, the obstinate ones as the protocols called them, were banished or destroyed. The word destroyed did not appear openly in every document. Sometimes it hid behind phrases like final pacification, permanent solution, necessary removal from the record, or protection of the remaining order. But Manador was old enough and clever enough to read what was really written there. Violence had been used. Not as an accident in an overheated conflict, but deliberately, decided, justified.

They had not only defeated a school.

They had erased it.

And more than that, they had bound its memory.

Because what had been discovered down in the lower corridors was not a few boxes of chance finds, not the late emergency archive of a dissolved circle, but the remnants of an entire library. The library of a school that no longer existed. Bound knowledge, sealed off from the future and now rediscovered, whether by chance or because time itself was tugging at old seals, Manador could not yet say.

He read on and found something worse.

The School of Light had not been the only one to vanish.

There had been two other schools as well.

Illusion.

And necromancy.

One in Zoordak, the other in Tandor.

Manador sat with the parchment in his hands and felt something cold rise in him, not fear in the usual sense, but that kind of unease that comes when an entire worldview is not destroyed by a single blow but undermined piece by piece, until it suddenly sounds hollow when you knock on it. Zoordak. Tandor. Places that stood, that flourished, that taught, that told their own stories, and beneath all of it there were apparently layers hardly anyone spoke of anymore or even knew. Schools that had not simply died out, but been made forgotten, pushed out of memory, written out of the Codex, erased from the halls. Manador wondered how often in his life he had already walked past places where the wall knew something he did not.

He wished he understood all of this better.

Not the individual sentences. He understood those. Not even the obvious lines of power, fear, and victors’ rights. Those were unpleasantly easy to see. What he did not understand was the whole. How vast this process must have been. How deeply it reached into the self understanding of all the schools today. How many teachings, rites, restrictions, even hostilities were perhaps only the echo of ancient decisions whose true cause lay forgotten. And most unpleasant of all was the question of whether this was truly the past, or merely an old form of what mages always do as soon as they call themselves order and want to secure power.

Manador slowly set one of the scrolls aside and rubbed his face with both hands.

Then he reached for the next one.