Anadar VII/III

18

No one really paid attention to him.Morgut quickly realized that this was his greatest safety. In a city in uproar, where rumors moved faster than carts, orders, and dust, a single young man hardly stood out as long as he behaved as if he belonged there. And he did. He had grown up in Ashambrat. He knew the rhythm of the streets, knew when it was best to keep to the edge, when he had to walk upright, and when lowered eyes offered more protection than any mask. As long as he did not run into someone who truly knew him, he could move through the city almost unnoticed.

Gnok’s tower served him as refuge.It was still a mystery where the old mage had gone, but Morgut pushed the question aside. There might be reasons. There had to be reasons. Right now something else mattered. The city was preparing for an attack, that was impossible to miss. Everywhere mages, students, and messengers ran about. Groups were formed, places assigned, supplies distributed. And above everything lay rumors, many rumors, and one was loudest of all. A desert people, they said, had ambushed mages and was now on the way to the city. The citizens swallowed it eagerly, and it gave them a reason to cheer the mages, who now, as they believed, devoted themselves entirely to their defense.

For Morgut there was only one problem, and that problem had a name.Gudi.

He did not know where his sister was. And he could hardly ask anyone. So he slipped through the city, listened to half conversations, caught names and scraps of words, searched for a rumor, a hint, a trail. He found nothing. With each day the certainty grew in him that soon he would have no choice but to search the dungeons themselves, blind, and at the risk of walking straight into the arms of his enemies.

Then the better idea came to him.He did not have to find the prison.He had to follow those who knew where Gudi was.

At first he chose Tzadier. Unobtrusively, patiently, over several days. He knew that Tzadier at least knew where Gudi was being kept. But the man never went into any dungeon. He was busy, apparently part of that inner circle that took part directly in meetings with Hokn’f, the circle that was supposed to whip the other mages into shape, made them drill, hammered spells into them, tried to turn them into something that would look like an army when it mattered. It seemed to have little success. Morgut saw it in their faces, in their movements, in the uncertainty with which many carried their new importance.

He was about to begin the search on his own when luck helped him.He overheard a conversation between Tzadier and another mage.

“Do you already know what we do with the brat in the dungeon?”“Kill her if she annoys you, Okom.”“Why would I. She suffers enough.”

Tzadier laughed softly, almost friendly.

“You are too soft. That is why you will not get far.”He tapped the other man on the chest.“You are too tender. Get rid of her and fall in line.”

Then he left Okom standing there with his indecision.

So from then on Morgut followed Okom.As best he could. As unnoticed as he could. This time he chose the raven more often, circled, perched on ledges, parapets, window sills, let the man walk beneath him as if he were just another bird no one cared about. After a few days he was sure which building he had to search.

He prepared.He dressed plainly, like one of the many running errands these days. Into the pouch he had brought from the Fiery Fortress he packed food, water, strips of cloth, something for cleaning, small things he would need in the dark. Everything else he left carefully in Gnok’s tower, always placing things so they would not stand out at once if someone searched the place. Above all he hid the Moon Drops and the sheet music especially well.

Then he slipped into the building.

It was early evening, when corridors felt fuller than they really were because footsteps echoed everywhere and voices bounced off stone. Morgut waited a long time, watched the door, the сменes of the guards, the routes of the servants. When he was sure the right moment had come, he slid inside, back tight to the wall, every movement small and controlled.

The building itself looked harmless at the top. Workrooms, storerooms, a narrow inner courtyard with a well whose water was hardly used. Only farther back, behind a heavy door, did the other world begin. The air grew cooler. Duller. A smell of stone, sweat, old blood, and stagnant dampness lay in it. A stairway led down.

Morgut listened.Nothing.Only the distant, irregular drip somewhere deeper below.

He went down.

The steps were narrow and uneven. Torches were set into the walls, too far apart, so that the darkness between them felt almost like its own fabric. At the bottom a corridor branched left and right. Morgut stopped, breathed shallowly, listened again. From the right came a sound. Not loud. More like a cough. An exhausted, dry sound that hardly had the strength to sound like life.

He went right.

One cell after another passed. Some empty. Some with figures inside, barely visible in the dark. Once he heard a whimper. Once only rustling. Then he saw her.

Gudi.

She sat slumped against the wall, knees drawn up, head laid on them, and even in the weak light Morgut saw how much she had suffered. Her wounds had closed, most of them at least, but that did not make the sight easier. It was the misery after that hit him. The exhaustion. The grime. The way she looked even sitting as if she had to spend all her strength just to keep from collapsing further. Her clothes were torn. Her face had grown thinner. Around her mouth lay that dried, hollow line people get when they have cried too long and drunk too little.

Morgut struggled not to say her name out loud at once.

Instead he worked on the lock. It posed no problem, even without magic. He had procured lock picks. As a child he had realized early that access to everything mattered, and he had taught himself the relevant knowledge. Now it proved useful again. There was a soft click. Gudi lifted her head and flinched.

“Shhh,” Morgut whispered.

For one heartbeat she did not recognize him. Then her eyes flew wide open and everything in her face broke open at once. In two quick steps he was with her, knelt, and held her before she could make a sound.

“I am here,” he whispered. “I am here, Gudi.”

She trembled in his arms. Not wildly. More in those small, exhausted jolts that come from a body that no longer knows whether it is allowed to hope. Tears ran down her face, quiet at first, then harder, and Morgut wiped them from her cheeks as best he could while he opened the pouch with his other hand.

He gave her water.He let her drink slowly, not too much at once. Then a little bread, softened, small bites, while he looked at her and tried again and again not to let the full rage rise that surged in him whenever his gaze slid over her arms, her shoulders, her neck. She was no longer bleeding. No longer freshly injured. But what they had done to her sat deeper.

“I am sorry,” she said at last, hoarse.

Morgut closed his eyes briefly.

“Never say that again.”

“I thought you would not come.”

“I will get you out of here,” he said. “Not today. Not yet. But soon. I swear it.”

She looked at him. In her eyes there was something so raw and so tired it almost tore him apart.

“Please,” she whispered.

He dried her tears with his sleeve, brushed her hair from her face, and forced himself not to stay longer than was wise. Every second down here was a risk. For her. For him. For everything.

Just as he was about to pull the cell door closed again, he heard steps.Steps in the corridor.Slow. Hesitant.

Okom.

Morgut felt blood pounding at his temples. For a breath his mind went empty. Then he moved. Fast, silent, pressed into the shadow of a niche opposite, flattened against the damp wall and drew the remaining darkness around his body as best he could. No real spell. More an old habit of angle, breath, and absolute stillness.

Okom came closer.

He carried a lamp in one hand and in the other a knife. Morgut saw it at once. Gudi saw it too.

The young mage stopped in front of the cell. The light in his hand trembled slightly. Not only from the flame. His fingers shook with it. He did not open the door right away. He just stood there and looked in, and Morgut understood that there was no Tzadier in this man, no Hokn’f, no cold appetite for pain. Only weakness. Cowardice. And a conscience he wanted to get rid of without knowing how.

Okom thought it might be the end now.He had not brought the knife because he truly wanted it. He had brought it because Tzadier had to be right. Because they all had to be right, the ones who told him he only had to become hard enough to belong. That pity was just another name for unfitness. That one could not stay soft in a time like this.

But now he stood here and saw the girl.Too thin. Too pale. Too exhausted.

And nothing in him could take the final step.

What, he thought, is this supposed to make of me. What is it supposed to be for. She will die here without me too. She suffers anyway. Why must it be me. Why must I prove I am not a coward by stabbing a prisoner.

He hated himself for the thought even as it rose. Hated his weakness. His fear of Tzadier. His fear of himself. But the knife sank in his hand. He did not go in. He only pretended to check her condition, muttered something indistinct, and turned away again.

When his steps faded, Morgut breathed properly for the first time.

He waited longer. A long time. Only when he was certain Okom was gone did he dare slip out of his hiding place. He looked to Gudi once more. She nodded faintly, eyes full of fear and hope at once.

Then he left.

With a heavy heart. Teeth clenched. Yet also with something he had not had before. Certainty.

He had found his sister.She lived. She was not being harmed at this moment. And he now knew where she was.

On the way back he swore revenge.On Tzadier.And even more on Hokn’f.

Meanwhile Hokn’f regarded the city as if it belonged to him not only politically, but in a deeper sense, as if every stone, every door, every person in it were part of his property. The building of a mage army advanced, as well as it could in such short time. He was still waiting for news from the other schools, but that would take time. The messengers had left only a week ago. Until then he had to work with what he had.

And while outside guards were posted, patrols assigned, students arranged into miserable little units, he withdrew with the necromancy book into the catacombs.

In Ashambrat the dead were kept there.

In the desert, flesh mummified quickly. The air stole moisture and rot with a greed that could almost seem cleansing, if one did not think too closely about what it was cleansing. Between stone, salt, dust, and silent laid out corpses, Hokn’f began to experiment.

The first time was not grand.Not ceremonial.Not even safe.

He stood in a chamber where three old bodies lay, already sunken, the flesh leathered tight to bone, the eye sockets dark and hollow. The book lay open on a stone table. Beside it a lamp. The flame was small and yellow. Its movement made the shadows restless.

Hokn’f had read the pages more than once. Not because he doubted, but because he enjoyed the feeling that here, before him, lay something no one in his city commanded yet. New power. New possibility. A tool that could not only bring the living to heel, but perhaps also those who wanted nothing anymore and therefore never resisted.

He began to speak.

Softly at first.Then firmer.

The words of necromancy were different from his own spells. Drier. More brittle. Almost grinding in the mouth, as if they had to push through dust and grave air before they could take shape. He drew signs into the air. The lamp flickered. Something in the temperature of the room changed, barely noticeable at first, then clearer. The silence thickened, as if it too held its breath.

Nothing happened.For a heartbeat.

Then something cracked.

A small, dry sound, like something deep in a rotten branch finally breaking through after years.

Hokn’f lifted his gaze.

The hand of the middle corpse had moved. One finger first. Then two. Slow, jerky, without grace, without any remnant of humanity. More like something being pulled from outside, without understanding it once had a will of its own.

Hokn’f stepped closer.

His heart beat faster. Not from fear. From exhilaration.

He spoke on.

The cracking multiplied. Shoulder joints jerked. The head of the dead tilted aside, then snapped back forward with an ugly, dry jolt. Dust trickled down. At last the upper body rose. Slowly. Far too slowly for anything living, and precisely because of that, it was horrible. The dead mouth opened, not wide, only a slit, but no sound came. No soul had returned. No person. Only movement.

Then the corpse half sat up.

The eye sockets were empty. And yet for a fleeting instant Hokn’f had the feeling he was being watched.

A second body twitched.Then a third.

Not clean. Not ordered. Not like soldiers woken from sleep. More like puppets into which a foreign will was groping, still having to learn how limbs, sinews, and the remaining weight of a dead body worked together.

Hokn’f smiled.

Slowly at first.Then wider.

Because what sat there before him in the half dark of the catacombs, half raised, half still tangled in burial cloth, was unnatural, was magnificent.

He had awakened the dead.

And the first time one of the empty skulls snapped toward him with a jerk far too fast, even he felt a cold shiver along his back for the fraction of a moment.

Then delight won.

Not delight in the art.Delight in the possibility.

19

They were met by a carriage.

The evening before, Marabar had indicated to Slonda, with that calm self assurance that expected no objection and therefore provoked none, that he should pack what he might need for the coming time. A carriage would take them south at first light. When Slonda had asked where exactly Sahretûn lay, the summoner had remained vague, not, as he said, because he wished to make a secret of it, but because he himself could not name it with precision.

“It goes south as far as Ashrambrat,” he had explained, “and from there onward by camel. A carriage would be a thoroughly impractical vehicle in the desert.”

So it came about that Slonda spent the night packing what he had gathered in the tower. It was not much. Even in the half year he had now lived in this time, little possession had formed around him. A few clothes. Notes. A handful of things that could be carried off without resistance. From the library he took several books as well, to occupy himself with should the chance arise. Borrowing was not the right word for it. He simply took them, with the quiet conviction that no one who truly understood his situation would reproach him for it.

The next morning they climbed into the carriage.

In driving rain they set off southward.

The roads were paved throughout, which was their only stroke of luck, because everything beyond them had by now become almost impassable. To the right and left, the land lay heavy and dark under water. Streams had burst their banks, small ditches had turned into brown currents, and more than once they had to climb down while the carriage was loaded onto makeshift ferries to cross a swollen river. It was a journey of wetness, clay, creaking wheels, and the dull smell of soaked earth.

Meanwhile, they continued their conversation.

Not casually, not to kill time, but with that peculiar persistence that can arise between men who have long understood that they take one another seriously on a certain level. It returned to power, responsibility, knowledge, and exchange, to the old questions that never quite end, they only change their clothing. And soon the conversation took the direction it almost had to take with the two of them, the moment they found themselves alone together for more than a few breaths.

Marabar sat opposite Slonda, his hands folded, while rain struck the carriage wall outside.

“Master of Time, Slonda,” he said, “now that our exchange is decided and we touch again upon the question of responsibility, I would like to know whether you still incline to distinguish knowledge from its application, or whether your judgement has in the meantime moved closer to my view.”

Slonda glanced briefly toward the window, behind which only grey water under a grey sky slid past.

“I am still inclined to distinguish the two,” he said. “Yet it seems to me, at the same time, that this distinction must not be confused with a separation. Knowledge does not stand outside what can be done with it. It is simply not identical with its use.”

Marabar nodded slowly.

“Then you would say that a work which makes calamity possible is not calamity as long as it rests unread.”

“Not quite,” Slonda replied. “I would say that a work which makes calamity possible is already part of a dangerous order even if it has not yet been worked, yet it reaches its full weight only where will and deed bind themselves to it.”

“That is a fine distinction.”

“The finer distinctions are often the only ones worth defending.”

Marabar smiled.

“And yet,” he said, “we live in a world in which the fine distinctions are trampled with particular enthusiasm the moment a coarser accusation can be raised more comfortably.”

“That,” Slonda said dryly, “is a observation nearly every school could agree on.”

“Not every school,” Marabar countered. “Some schools already consider the coarser accusation a form of truth, because it benefits enough people.”

Slonda looked at him.

“And Sahretûn keeps itself free of that.”

“Not at all. We merely consider ourselves more practiced at clothing our conveniences in terms that take on the shape of principles.”

Despite himself, Slonda had to smile a little.

“A remarkably candid self description.”

“Only to someone clever enough not to take it for a confession.”

They fell silent for a moment as the carriage struck a pothole, heaved heavily, and settled again.

Then Slonda said, “Allow me, in return, a question. You speak often of responsibility, of limitation, of what a summoner must be able to justify, yet if justification moves to the centre, is there not a danger that morality gradually becomes nothing more than the art of good phrasing.”

Marabar lifted his brows slightly.

“That is a sharply placed objection.”

“I consider it justified.”

“Perhaps it is,” Marabar said. “Yet the counterquestion must be asked whether a morality that can never be formulated is anything more than a feeling that runs off first when things grow serious.”

“So you trust language more than conscience.”

“No,” Marabar said calmly. “I trust conscience less than others are accustomed to. Conscience is mutable. It adapts to hunger, fear, loneliness, love, pride, and opportunity. Language, by contrast, at least forces one to choose a form. It does not protect against guilt, but it makes guilt more visible.”

“Or better disguised.”

“That too.”

“Then,” Slonda said, “we are back at the old dilemma. Knowledge for knowledge. Trust for trust. Form for desire.”

“Yes,” Marabar said. “Only that, the longer I speak with you, the more I suspect that you are less interested in knowledge itself than in a method of living with it without being ruined by it.”

Slonda did not answer at once.

The sentence had struck him more precisely than he liked.

“And if it were so,” he said at last, “there would still be no contradiction in it. Whoever only wishes to possess knowledge is already on the way to serving it. Whoever wishes to learn to live with it may still have a chance to remain master of himself.”

Marabar lowered his gaze briefly, as though committing the sentence to memory.

“That,” he said, “is almost something that ought to stand in a code.”

“Then see to it that it does not end up there. Everything that stands in a code will sooner or later be used by a fool against the one who meant it better.”

This time Marabar laughed softly and openly.

“With each day you grow more sympathetic to me, Master of Time, Slonda.”

The farther south they travelled, the less the rain fell without pause. Gradually the showers were broken by sunlight, and the world seemed to remember, slowly, that light could do more than brighten the edges of clouds. When they finally reached Ashrambrat, the whole city was in bloom. Even the desert around it still carried the echo of the rain. Between stones and along the edges of paths, green pushed up, tentative yet clear, and the gardens around the school stood as lush as Slonda had never seen them.

The city, too, was different again to him.

Not in its core, for the school at its centre remained the centre, surrounded by gardens that lay like an ordered promise between stone and desert, but everything else appeared fuller, richer, more alive. They stayed there for two days. Marabar saw to the caravan that was assembled for them. Slonda watched camels being loaded, waterskins checked, provisions bundled, and all manner of goods packed in quantities that showed him Sahretûn was supplied rarely, yet thoroughly.

“We do not buy often,” Marabar said when Slonda asked him about it. “But from time to time even Sahretûn requires things it does not produce itself.”

Then they rode south.

At the head of a long caravan, with dozens of camels plodding slowly and patiently through the heat. The farther they went, the hotter the days became. The nights, by contrast, remained cool. Marabar found the way with a certainty that impressed Slonda, especially since the landscape soon looked so similar to the untrained eye that each horizon seemed a repetition of the last.

Eight days after they had set out, the caravan hands left them and turned back.

There, at that point, Marabar asked Slonda to bind his eyes.

“Not out of mistrust toward you,” he said, “but out of loyalty to the place to which you are being led.”

Slonda did as he was told.

By day he wore the blindfold. At night he was permitted to remove it in camp, but he was not permitted to wander. So they rode on for several more days. Only on one morning did Marabar dispense with the blindfold again.

“Master of Time, Slonda,” he said with a solemnity that, even for him, was set a shade finer than usual, “today we will reach the goal of our journey, and it seems only right and proper to me that an event of such magnitude and weight should be received not behind a veiled gaze but by your own eyes.”

Slonda took off the blindfold.

And they rode on.

The sand changed, at first gradually. The yellow, bright land grew darker, then grey, then almost black. They rode down into a hollow between natural rock formations that looked as though a giant had once flung them there and they had frozen in mid fall. Volcanic, Slonda thought immediately. Everything about the black stone seemed old, violent, and yet stilled, as though an ancient eruption had hardened into silence.

Then they came to a tunnel.

Wide enough for the entire caravan to pass. They rode in. The sound of steps changed. Walls closed in. The smell of hot dust and stone thickened. In the distance Slonda finally saw light.

They rode toward it.

And when they reached the opening, his breath caught.

Below them opened a wide valley in black rock, with black sand, as though the world down there had not been made by the same hand as the rest of the earth. And in its centre stood, raised high in dark majesty, the goal of their journey.

Sahretûn.

The city lay there like a fortress that had not been built but decided. Black walls. High battlements. Towers rising sharp into the air. On the walls, fires burned in great bowls, their light holding something threatening even in daylight. Slonda had never seen a city like it. Entirely unlike the Fiery Fortress, not rising and open, but closed, defensive, sombre, as though every stone had been set with the thought that it must withstand the next assault.

More dangerous.

Darker.

And possessed of a power that did not need to be displayed, because it was present in every line already.

So the city of the summoners lay before him.

20

Prince Zarad could not postpone his departure forever, and so the day of farewell finally came. Anadar would gladly have accepted the spoken invitation to the North. His interest was too great to experience the culture of the Dark Elves not only in hints, not only in conversations, but in their own world, in their own order, in their real life. If an opportunity ever offered itself, he meant to follow it. But for now there were more urgent matters.

Again and again his attention was pulled back to the images Zarad had shown him. He still could not make proper sense of who had carried out the attempt on Mother’s life. It sat on the tip of his tongue. He was sure he knew the figure, or at least the movement, the halting, unsteady way of approaching the target. It hovered just behind his thoughts, and yet slipped away each time he tried to seize it more precisely.

In the meantime Isidre had by no means been idle.

She had had instruments, reagents, and herbs brought from Tandor, and when Anadar went looking for her, he stepped into an alchemical laboratory that at that moment looked more like a mind’s field camp than a room of order. Vessels, tubes, bowls, mortars, vials, and burners stood everywhere. Several experiments ran at once on multiple tables. A sweet, sharp, bitter, and metallic smell lay layered in the air, and in the middle of it all stood Isidre, focused and calm, like someone who only remembered the world again when it addressed her directly.

She looked up.

“Oh, Anadar, how good that you are here.”

She made one more mark on one of her setups before turning to him. Anadar let his gaze travel over the sheer number of arrangements. Isidre noticed and smiled.

“What did you expect?”

She stepped to him and held a glass tube under his nose. Inside was a whitish solid, crossed by several differently colored bands, three in total, clearly separated from one another.

“I was able to narrow it down,” she said. “To four.”

Anadar looked at her.

“What were you able to narrow down?”

Isidre closed her eyes for a moment and smiled at herself.

“Yes. Forgive me. I begin, as always, in the middle. Four different poisons.”

She pointed first to the three colored rings in the tube, then to a glass farther back that held a greenish liquid.

“It was a mixture of four poisons. Two of them were strongly water soluble. One was responsible for the paralysis, the other prevented blood from clotting. Both are dangerous, but I think we have largely pushed them out of the body by now. The other two, though, are the truly lethal components.”

She raised the glass tube again.

“This one is a toxin that occurs in a certain fish species and is extracted from it. Very expensive. Very effective. It attacks the internal organs, slowly but thoroughly. And this one,” she tapped the upper ring, “is the treacherous part. Truly treacherous. A toxin found in certain spiders. Not primarily lethal. It attacks the brain. The consciousness. The mind. If I had to guess, I would say this is exactly the part that must still worry us the most.”

She said it with that quiet sobriety which, in her case, almost sounded like pride. Not pride in the act, of course, but in the fact that she had recognized a shape at all inside this chaos.

Anadar stared at her for a moment.

“And what do we do with this information now?”

“Oh. Right, yes.”

Isidre swirled two small vials in which differently colored liquids glowed.

“Thanks to Xiodrie, who did exactly the right thing and removed most of the poison from the wound before it could really sink deep, and thanks to these two little mixtures here, I think we can make progress. I began treatment this morning.”

Hope stirred in Anadar, cautiously at first, then stronger.

“You mean Mother will soon be herself again?”

Isidre’s gaze softened. Almost regretfully.

“That, my dear, no one can say. I will not give you a prophecy about whether it will happen, or how long it will take. But at least now we have something we can set against the poison. Whether she will ever be the same again, I cannot promise you.”

It was not great hope.

But it was hope.

And right now it was more than he had had only a few days ago.

They went back to Mother.

Xiodrie was there as a matter of course, as if no one could even have considered that she might step away from this watch. Anadar sat down at the bedside of the woman he loved and revered so deeply, took her hand in his, and said nothing. He watched the two women give her drops of one of the substances, with the tense attention of people doing something they do not know will help, or only delay again.

“I will stay with her today,” Anadar said at last. “You both need some sleep.”

They did not argue. It almost seemed to embarrass them how relieved they were. They said their goodbyes softly and promised to return later.

Then he was alone with Mother.

For a while he simply sat there. Held her hand. Listened to her breathing. Watched the fine changes in her face, as if he could read from each shift whether she was coming closer or slipping farther away. At some point his mind began to wander again, and this time he did not accept the emptiness he had met in her so far.

He went searching for her.

He pushed into her mind and found again that deserted expanse, that thinned, bleached interior that tightened his chest every time. But this time he did not come carefully, not cautiously. He set his presence like a beacon into that emptiness.

“Mother,” he called in her mind. “Where are you?”

He received no answer.

And so the days passed.

All three, Xiodrie, Isidre, and Anadar, had the sense that Mother’s body was slowly recovering. She was no longer quite so gray. No longer quite so weak. Still old, still hollowed, still infinitely far from the radiant image they had always carried of her. But the antidote was working. Only the mind. Anadar still felt nothing there. No clear answer. No warmth. No voice.

Still he did not leave her side.

He anchored his presence in her mind as well as he could. Most of the time one of the two women was with him in the room, often silent, saying few words, and yet keeping watch with him. He spoke with Xiodrie when he learned that she could shift into other animals, not through spells, not through scrolls, but out of an inner feeling.

That fascinated him almost more than the shifting itself.

He wanted to understand how she worked magic, because it seemed so fundamentally different from how he and the mages did it. She tried to explain as best she could, returning again and again to the fact that she did not read books, but did it by feeling, disposition, and an instinctive understanding that often slipped free of her own language. Anadar listened attentively, asked questions, and for short stretches even forgot his exhaustion.

So many ways to work magic.

It surprised him more than he wanted to admit that one did not have to be bound to script, word, and ritual form in order to use it.

So the days drifted by.

And in quiet moments he found himself wishing, now and then, that he could be with Shara.

At night, when he sat at Mother’s bedside, held his presence anchored in her and yet dozed off against his will, he kept jolting awake from the same dream. A dream he had had before. He stood on a cliff. Beneath him nothing but depth. Behind him voices. Again and again the same question.

How will you decide.

Sometimes Manador spoke it. Sometimes Isidre. Then Shara. Mother. Morgut. The same question in a different mouth. The same pressure. The same expectation that he must take a step he did not yet understand. And again and again he stepped out, or thought he stepped out, and woke in fright, heart racing, only to sink into sleep again later.

Other dreams came and went.

But this one returned, again and again.

Then came the night when his dream and his watch slid into each other.

He sat beside Mother again. His presence lay in her mind, familiar, quiet, almost habitual. He dozed without fully sleeping, and saw again the scene Zarad had shown him. The room. The figure. The knife in the hand. The movement toward Mother.

Then it happened.

Something seized his presence in Mother’s mind.

Not a thought. Not a twitch. Not a probing resistance.

Something immense.

Something old.

It hit him so suddenly that he did not even grasp what was happening before it was already tossing him around. In her mind a storm broke loose. A raw, ancient power reached for him, shook him, flung him about like a doll.

“Why!”

The scream did not come as language. It came as an upheaval.

“Why did you do that!”

He was not prepared. Not in dream. Not in waking. Not for this force. He tried to tear himself free, but what had him was of a magnitude against which, in that first moment, he was scarcely more than a point of light in the wind. It almost crushed him. Tore at him. Drove him back. He felt hatred. Bare, searing despair. A pain that had turned into rage before he could even name it.

He wrenched his eyes open.

And stared straight into Mother’s.

She had sat up.

She looked at him with a hatred so alien and so dreadful that in the first heartbeat he did not understand whom she believed she was looking at. Her hands were dug into him, or were about to be, and her mind was still pressing with full force against his.

“Mother,” he gasped.

She was about to kill him.

Not intentionally, perhaps. Not as Mother. But in that confusion of mind and memory in which she was clearly somewhere else entirely.

He swung and struck her hard across the face.

“Stop,” he hissed with the last of his strength. “It is me.”

At the same time, in her mind, he braced himself with everything he had left. Made himself large. Widened his presence. Pushed back against what wanted to destroy him.

“Mother!”

Now he shouted it in desperation.

And then it eased.

As suddenly as it had come.

The violence withdrew. The pressure released. The storm inside her collapsed into itself. Anadar fought for air and looked into her eyes. There was no hatred there now. Only recognition that came too late and turned at once into pain.

A tear ran down her face.

Her lips moved.

“Gnok,” she said.

Just that one word.

Then she sank back into the pillows.

21

After arriving in Sahretûn, Slonda was not immediately beset by questions, examinations, or rites.

To his own surprise, they gave him time at first. Not much, but enough that the city did not swallow him whole at once. They presented him, yes, first and foremost to those in Sahretûn whose rank allowed them to judge a stranger before he even knew what station he himself held in their eyes. Yet it did not happen roughly. Not as an interrogation. More like the calm displaying of a rare object, one they had not yet decided was useful, dangerous, or both at once.

Marabar remained with him through all of it.

They shared a room, which surprised Slonda at first and then struck him as clever. They did not want to leave him alone, not out of sheer distrust, but because Sahretûn was not a place where a stranger could simply wander at will and happen to open the wrong door. Marabar led him through the city, introduced him to others, to masters, students, akloves, adepts, and with each day Slonda saw more clearly how strictly pyramidal the hierarchy of this city truly was.

There was no ambiguity of rank. No sloppy pretense of equality that, in daily life, behaved as though every man differed from the next only by talent. In Sahretûn, everyone wore their place visibly, not only in clothing, posture, and marks upon the body, but in the way others stepped aside for them or approached them. Who spoke first. Who kept silent. Who stood. Who remained seated. Everything was ordered.

And Marabar stood higher than Slonda had first assumed.

Not a master yet, no. But he had clearly stepped far enough out of the circle of the lower ranks that even those above him let their gaze rest on him as if his next step were only a matter of the right sky, no longer a matter of doubt.

Slonda and Marabar were permitted to dine with the masters of Sahretûn.

That alone said enough.

Most of the other students and lesser ranks gave them a wide berth, above all Marabar, whenever he was present. It was not open fear. It was the cautious distance with which people treat someone who may not be allowed to command them yet, but already casts himself into their future in a way that makes familiarity unwise. Slonda noticed it immediately.

One evening, when they returned to their room after such a meal, he spoke of it.

“They avoid you.”

Marabar set aside his cloak, smooth and unhurried, as though the sentence were neither reproach nor surprise.

“Not all of them.”

“Enough that it stands out.”

Marabar looked at him.

“Perhaps they are wise enough to ration their closeness, as long as they do not know whether one day they will wish to be seen or judged by me.”

“That sounds like a city where one learns early whose shadow will fall longest.”

“Precisely,” Marabar said. “And Sahretûn is very good at seeing early who will one day cast a long shadow.”

Soon afterward Slonda learned why Marabar was already treated this way.

The next Black Crown was approaching. Not just any. A full one. And to be raised to master beneath a full Black Crown was something special in Sahretûn.

They did not explain it to Slonda at once in full breadth. At first he caught only hints, half sentences, turns of phrase that made it clear this sign in the heavens was far more than mere superstition. Only at one of the evening meals, when several masters were present and Marabar was already treated with that cool respect that felt like an advance glance, did one of them speak of it more openly.

It was an older master with a narrow face, whose tattoos shone dully in lamplight.

“A student of Sahretûn, Marabar,” he said, “you now step into a rare favor. Not everyone is granted elevation beneath a full Black Crown.”

Marabar inclined his head.

“Favor is a large word for a trial, master of Sahretûn, Nodra.”

“Only a fool separates trial and favor entirely,” Nodra said. “The lesser crown returns again and again. Beneath it aspirants are shorn, teeth are sharpened, tongues are split, tattoos are set. Beneath it the lower and middle consecrations are performed. But the full crown closes only rarely. When the three moons arrange themselves in black succession above the southern sky, and the band of stars between them dims, then this is a night in which binding, dominion, and measure are tested in a special way.”

A second master added,

“Not everyone raised beneath the full crown is greater than those raised on ordinary nights. But everyone who stands beneath it will forever be held in a different remembering.”

Slonda listened intently.

“Then,” he said, “it is not only the rank that bears weight, but also the sky beneath which it is granted.”

Several gazes rested on him.

Nodra answered.

“Master of Time, Slonda, you of all should grasp this easily. No event is only what happens. It is always also the relation it bears to place, hour, order, and sign.”

Marabar said nothing to that.

But Slonda saw something working in him. Not pride. Not openly. More a gathering of himself, as if he too understood that the coming weeks would lead him not only upward, but deeper into the city itself.

Sahretûn remained a riddle to Slonda.

He was allowed to move freely, that was true, and yet again and again he had the impression that essential parts of the city were simply not accessible to him. He lost his way often. The corridors resembled each other, not by chance, but as though their repetition had been planned on purpose. Stairs led into courtyards, courtyards into halls, halls into corridors that nearly mirrored each other in their black severity. Doors appeared in places where he did not believe he had seen them before. Some paths ended abruptly at walls that did not convince him as mere stone.

At last he mentioned it to Marabar.

“Not even I,” Marabar said, “could claim with certainty to know all parts of this city.”

“Not even you.”

“No.”

“Then Sahretûn is larger than it shows.”

“Or more closed.”

Slonda looked at him.

“And certain areas are bound to rank.”

“Certain areas,” Marabar said, “no one would enter whose rank is still too low.”

“Still,” Slonda repeated. “Then master is not the highest rank.”

Marabar turned his gaze to the window.

“The wind is turning,” he said. “Tomorrow will be hotter.”

Slonda studied him.

“You are evading me.”

“Yes.”

“Then I have asked the right question.”

“Or the one that cannot yet be answered.”

And with that the matter was ended, at least for that day.

After the very brief period of settling in, Slonda’s actual training began.

Marabar told him that, in truth, it had already begun in Gontar. There, the first conversations, the examination, the laying of foundations in terms and concepts had taken place. Now, within the secured walls of Sahretûn, the true rituals and spells would follow.

And so they worked.

Not only on summoning.

Also on the nature of time.

As Slonda had once learned from Drinda in Tandor, he now showed Marabar how to invoke planetary configurations and work with them. He explained that time magic did not consist merely of intervention, but of orientation, relation, position, the weighting of moments, the recognizing of knot points before one could even think of movement. It took a long time for Marabar to internalize this. Not because he lacked intelligence, but because his thinking came from another school. He thought in bindings, thresholds, exchanges, and names. Slonda forced him to think in courses.

Marabar learned slowly.

But thoroughly.

Around the same time, Slonda was allowed to summon his first demons himself.

The first summoning, of course, went wrong.

Later Marabar even claimed it had to go wrong, since no first call could be pure enough to hold, on the first attempt, what it demanded. Slonda had set the signs cleanly, spoken the name in the proper order, forgotten none of the limits, and yet something came through that did not quite match what had been called. The circle began to tremble in one place. A shadow surged too far against the binding. Marabar intervened, swift and without any agitation, and banished the demon back before true damage could form.

“This is how it always begins,” he said afterward. “At the start you make mistakes. The art does not begin where you work without mistakes. It begins where you recognize mistakes before they become self sustaining.”

So they worked in parallel.

Marabar taught Slonda the art of summoning. Slonda taught Marabar the foundations of time magic.

Weeks passed.

And then the full Black Crown arrived.

The night began differently from other nights. Over Sahretûn lay a taut solemnity that did not grow loud, but changed the movements of the entire city. Fires burned on the walls. In the courtyards, black cloth banners were drawn. No one spoke unnecessarily loudly. Even the air seemed to be waiting. When the moons finally rose, Slonda saw why this sign had earned its own name.

Three moons stood above the southern sky. Not exactly in a line, but slightly offset, like the points of a crown. Between them stretched a dark space of sky in which the band of stars seemed to retreat. Not erased. More swallowed. The Black Crown closed over Sahretûn.

The ceremony took place in a broad courtyard within the inner walls.

Not in a hall. Not hidden. But beneath the open sky, so that moon, darkness, and the city itself might be witnesses. The masters stood in a half circle. Behind them the other ranks, strictly ordered. The fires on the walls threw light across black stone slabs, faces, tattoos, tense mouths. In the middle of the courtyard a circle had been drawn, not only with chalk or paint, but with cut lines in which dark metal had been set.

Marabar stepped in.

Bareheaded. Dressed in black. Without ornament. Without any sign of adornment.

Nodra stood opposite him.

“Student of Sahretûn, Marabar,” he said, his voice carrying across the entire courtyard, “you have been tested in form, measure, binding, responsibility, and dominion. You have held the circle where others would have broken. You have called and banished. You have borne what was laid upon you. Do you now wish to be raised beneath the Black Crown into the station of masters?”

“I do,” Marabar said.

“And do you know that dominion in Sahretûn is not dignity without burden, but burden without end.”

“I know it.”

“And do you know that every knowledge given to you henceforth does not elevate you, but binds you more deeply.”

“I know it.”

Then the ritual began.

It was not mere naming. Not speaking and affirmation alone. A circle was opened, tighter than those Slonda had seen before. A horned demon was not summoned fully, but near enough that its presence filled the courtyard like pressure in the air. Several mouths among the circle of masters began to murmur at once. Marabar stood still in the center, hands open, fingers tense, while dark lines closed around his feet and opened again, as if his binding under this configuration still had to be proven once more.

The demon pressed.

Not with bodily force, but with pressure against order, mind, and measure.

Slonda saw sweat bead at Marabar’s temples. Saw his tattoos flare first silver, then gold. Saw his voice deepen as he held the form. It was not a long struggle. But it had a density that made minutes feel immense.

At last the circle calmed.

The pressure receded.

And Nodra stepped forward.

A staff was brought. Black. Slender. A white sphere at the upper end, a dark one at the lower.

Nodra held it out to Marabar.

“Under the full Black Crown, before the walls of Sahretûn, in knowledge of what we bear, and in recognition of what you have held, we raise you. From this hour on you are Master of Sahretûn, Marabar.”

Marabar took the staff.

And the entire assembly bowed their heads, if only slightly.

From then on he was Master of Sahretûn, Marabar.

Slonda, as a guest, was exempt from all these hierarchies, which in truth greatly relieved him. At the latest when he witnessed on another occasion how an aklove of Sahretûn was treated under pain while his teeth were sharpened, he knew he could well do without the ritual zeal of this city.

With Marabar’s elevation, their relationship also changed.

Not outwardly. They continued to work. But Marabar began to press more clearly. Less in summoning, which he still taught Slonda with methodical patience, than in what he now demanded of him.

He wanted more.

He wanted the marrow of it.

One evening, as they spoke again of planetary configurations and anchoring, Marabar set his hands aside and said,

“Master of Time, Slonda, I have stood long enough in the antechambers of your art. It seems time to me that you no longer merely describe the relation between movement and constellation, but uncover that core for which your school is both admired and feared in the world.”

Slonda looked at him calmly.

“And what exactly do you mean by that.”

“You know very well.”

“Then say it anyway.”

Marabar gave a thin smile.

“Movement through time. Not merely reading its currents. Not merely recognizing its knots. But actual passage. The loosening from one current and the entering into another. You have led me around the body of your knowledge long enough. Now I want to see its heart.”

Slonda did not answer at once.

Then he said,

“No.”

Marabar lifted his brows slightly.

“That is a short answer for a man who otherwise takes such pleasure in distinctions.”

“Then I will give you a longer one. No, Master of Sahretûn, Marabar. I will not give you that knowledge.”

“Not now, or not ever.”

“Not ever.”

Marabar leaned back.

“Then you are willing to demand ever deeper circles of summoning from me, while you keep the innermost chamber of your art locked.”

“Yes.”

“This is unpleasant,” Slonda said, drawing one breath. “This is not injustice if there is a reason.”

“And that reason.”

“That this knowledge surpasses everything else I have shown you so far.”

Marabar looked at him for a long time.

“And you do not trust me.”

“I trust no one in this matter. Not even myself without reservation.”

“A convenient argument.”

“A true one.”

Marabar fell silent.

Then he said, with mild coldness,

“So you demand trust for trust, knowledge for knowledge, and the moment your fear touches the innermost circle, you suddenly call your retreat measure.”

“I call it responsibility.”

“And I,” Marabar said, “call it the point at which your fine building of reciprocity turns into a one way road.”

Slonda did not reply.

But the fissure was set.

Some time later it was Slonda himself who wanted more.

Until then Marabar had guided him cleanly, patiently, and strictly. Basic forms. Binding. Multiple bindings. First glimpses of more complex calls. But it was clear that even here something lay behind the last door. Especially since Slonda had understood that the hierarchy of Sahretûn did not end with the masters, he longed for more.

One evening he spoke it aloud.

“Master of Sahretûn, Marabar. You have brought me to the boundary of what you consider teachable. But I am not blind. There is more. There are circles you do not show me. Demons you speak of only in hints. I want to learn of the Horned Ones.”

Marabar did not even lift his gaze from the text he was reading.

“No.”

Now it was Slonda who went still.

“You are quick with that word.”

“Because here it is enough.”

“Not for me.”

Marabar closed the book.

“Then let me be more explicit. You are not ready.”

“That is your judgment.”

“Yes.”

“And if I do not share it.”

“Then that changes nothing about its validity.”

Slonda stepped closer.

“You demand the inner movements of my school and at the same time deny me yours.”

“I demand them,” Marabar said calmly, “because I believe you could bear them. I deny you the Horned Ones because I believe you cannot yet bear them.”

“Yet,” Slonda repeated. “That suddenly sounds like postponement.”

“Or like boundary.”

“And who draws it.”

“I do.”

They fell silent.

A long time.

Then Slonda said,

“Then we have arrived where our alliance fails. I want to learn of the Horned Ones. You want to travel through time. You deny me one. I deny you the other.”

Marabar set the book fully aside and looked at him openly.

“Yes,” he said. “That is where we have arrived.”

“And neither of us will yield.”

“Not in this matter.”

“Then we stand.”

“Then we stand.”

And so they reached a stalemate.

Not from lack of intelligence. Not because either misunderstood the other. But precisely because both understood perfectly what the other was asking. Slonda wanted the Horned Ones. Marabar wanted movement through time. Both knew the other’s knowledge lay deeper than anything that had been given so far. Both considered themselves entitled to demand it. And both considered themselves equally entitled to refuse it.

That was the true form of their standstill.

Not ignorance.

But balance.

22

From the moment she woke, nothing was the same as before.

After the struggle inside her mind, Anadar had been so exhausted he barely knew how he had managed to rise from the chair and leave the room. Xiodrie and Isidre had taken over, and when he left her, Mother had fallen into a waking sleep, quiet, present, yet not fully returned to that kind of presence one could call life among the living. She had been there again, inside her own mind. That alone had drained the last strength from his limbs. The force of her attack, which he had survived by a narrower margin than he liked, and the fight that followed, had hollowed him out. He fell into a sleep that was deep and black, and only woke a day later, somewhat recovered, though with that dull aftertaste in body and mind that does not let you forget what nearly happened the night before.

He dragged himself up, washed, and went straight to Mother’s room.

He did not know what to expect there. He still thought of her as weak, fragile, a woman who had paid dearly for her return and now clung to this world only with effort. When he entered, he stood in the doorway for a heartbeat.

Before him sat the golden figure again, half propped up in bed.

Not quite as radiant as before, not quite as light, but without doubt the woman everyone knew as Mother. Warmth had returned to her skin. Her hair shone. Her beauty was there again, though laid on more thinly than usual, as if the truth of her weakened body still lay beneath it and pressed upward, refusing to be forgotten. She was displeased with her condition all the same, and Isidre apparently reminded her every few breaths that she was meant to rest. Xiodrie, overjoyed at the return of the woman she called Mother, tried to mediate between them, and depending on the moment she was either ignored or promptly put to work.

When Anadar stepped in, he first received a long, deep look.

Mother fixed her gaze on him.

“You hit me,” she protested.

She lifted her chin slightly, and a bruise showed on her cheek, displayed with demonstrative dignity.

“Hard.”

Anadar did not let it move him. He came closer, bent down, and kissed her on the bruised cheek.

“Mother, how good it is to have you back with us.”

Then, in an innocent voice, he added, “You were trying to kill me. You are aware of that, Mother?”

She looked at him with her golden eyes.

“You had no business being in there.”

“Are you hiding something? And would you still be here today if I had not been in there?”

He leaned in and hugged her carefully. For a moment she stiffened. Then she returned the embrace.

“My dear,” she said softly.

“I am glad you are back with us.”

In that very moment he felt her again in his mind. Not probing. Not shy. She settled there the way someone sinks back into a familiar seat they had only left for a short while. She was there again. Not as emptiness, not as a distant echo, but as that golden, warm, dangerous presence Mother truly was.

With a deep sigh she let herself sink back into the pillows.

“What would I have done without the three of you.”

“You would have died,” Isidre said dryly. “Very quickly, too. Without Xiodrie you would have been dead within minutes.”

Mother reached both hands toward the younger woman.

“My daughter,” she said. “I can never forget that.”

Xiodrie blushed and looked down, as if she did not know where to put that kind of gratitude.

Anadar stayed with Mother all day.

They talked a lot. He needed to be sure she was truly better, that she was becoming herself again. She was still weak, that was impossible to miss. Yet the fact that she was once again wearing the golden beauty she so often showed the world was proof enough that her strength was returning. He had felt that too in the night, when she seized him in her mind and nearly crushed him like an annoying insect. The thought still made him shudder. She had taken him for Gnok. Not as a decision, not as a judgement, but as a reflex, born from pain, shock, and memory. She had defended herself with everything she had.

His thoughts drifted back there.

“I am sorry, my dear,” she said in his head, without moving her lips. “I had no control over it. It was a reflex.”

One of those conversations began that no one else in the room could hear.

“Am I an open book to you,” he thought back. “Do you always listen to my thoughts?”

“No. Not always. Only when you think as loudly as you are thinking now.”

She laughed inside his mind, and that laugh struck him almost as deeply as her return. He had missed it without fully knowing he had.

“I owe you much,” she said. “You brought me back. I was lost.”

“I think it was the neutralization of the poison.”

“That too.”

Then her tone turned serious.

“Now to the real matter, Anadar. I have a request.”

“Speak.”

A short silence followed. Then he felt her mind open and invite him. He stepped across, careful as always, and found her there in the shape he knew. Glowing gold. Overwhelmingly beautiful. Yet this time her beauty held something else. No seduction. No performance. More a deliberate choice to show herself.

She took him by the hand.

“Gnok would never have attacked me,” she said. “Never. Come. I will show you.”

And she led him into her past.

Not into mere images. Not into loose memories. She took him to Dioneès’ valley, to a time before she had ever used an illusion, when her beauty had truly been her own, not the golden garment she later wore. She showed him the valley in all its splendor. The light. The water. The slopes. The buildings. The life that had once been there. And she showed him the destruction as well. The erasure. The emptiness that remained when everything beautiful became ash, stone, and silence.

Then she showed him Gnok.

Not as the old mage. Not as her ally of recent years. But the Gnok she had loved. The man she had trusted. The warmth between them. The closeness. The ease of their bond.

“Never,” she said again. “Never would he have done this, Anadar. Something must have happened to him. And that, my dear, is what you must do for me. Find him. And set right what has happened. Please. Do it for me.”

In her mind she kissed the figure Anadar was there, and for both of them it was a very intimate moment. Never before had the woman everyone called Mother given someone such an insight. Never before had she allowed anyone to see so far into her background and her true motives.

“Please,” she said once more. “Find him for me.”

Later Anadar sat with Xiodrie in one of Zoordak’s courtyards.

He had decided to return to the Fiery Fortress in animal form, as a bird, a raven. Alone he did not dare. He knew the theory, yes, but he respected the practice. So he asked the former witch to show him how she did it.

She tossed the scrolls he had brought with barely hidden contempt.

“You will not learn it with that,” she said. “Not like this.”

Then she showed him.

Simple. Direct. With that instinctive knowledge that slipped past his thinking and fascinated him because of it. Anadar stared at her, mouth open, and asked her to show it again.

“It is not that you lose your intellect,” Xiodrie said. “It stays with you. And the step back into your human shape is formed from your desire, not from your scroll.”

She pointed again at his paper, as if to tell him he should finally forget it.

Anadar still shook his head, as if he refused to accept what he had seen. Yet he knew he had to try it himself. So he took the scroll again, worked the spell, and let the words go.

At first he thought nothing had happened.

Then his perception shifted.

The world did not jump. It rearranged itself. His eyes were suddenly placed differently in space. His body was no longer where he expected it to be. He looked up at a pile of his own clothing.

He wanted to complain in outrage, but from his new beak came only a harsh croak.

Then he understood.

He was in animal shape.

He spread his wings and looked at Xiodrie with new eyes. It felt good. Strange, but not wrong. More than that, it felt instinctively right, as if the body knew what to do before his mind could name it. He hopped a few steps, tested the weight, the balance, the new lightness.

And then he heard Mother in his mind.

“My dear, would you come to me, please. We need to speak.”

Without thinking he sprang.

His new body lifted into the air. It was as if he already knew how to fly. Not learned. Not understood. Simply present inside the animal’s body. He rose higher, glided through the courtyard, through an open window into Mother’s room, and landed on the bedpost.

She looked at him.

“Do you not think communication would be easier in human form?”

Anadar would have blushed if he could in that shape. So he only thought of changing back.

The result was less elegant.

He fell more than he transformed, half onto the bed and half past it, landing awkwardly, almost naked, in nothing but his underclothes. At once he understood this was a point he would need to work on. Xiodrie changed shape with her clothing. With him it plainly had not worked yet.

Mother looked at him.

“Anadar,” she said in feigned indignation, “I am still weak. Far too weak for…”

She left the sentence open.

He wanted to sink into the floor.

“I… I…” he stammered. “I need to practice that again.”

While he hastily threw a blanket around himself like a makeshift cloak, she praised him with almost exaggerated warmth.

“How lovely that you dared it. And successfully.”

He blushed even more.

Then she grew serious.

She spoke with him, and she knew he would leave soon.

“I will go to Ashambrat first,” he said. “I will try to find a trace of him there. Morgut should be there by now as well. Perhaps he has learned something.”

Mother nodded slowly.

“Be careful. Whoever holds Gnok is powerful. Very powerful. Gnok is a strong and experienced mage. Whoever brought him to the point of trying to make me kill you must be clever, very old, very wise, extremely powerful, and dangerous. It will not be Hokn`f. He is too weak for that. Be careful, my dear.”

23

For Roto, it was a completely new experience.

The two water mages helped him through it, but that did nothing to lessen the dread. The very first breaths underwater stirred panic and tightness in his chest. His body refused to believe this could work at all. Everything in him resisted the idea of drawing air beneath the surface. The respect for water sat too deep, for its weight, its otherness, its old power over anyone who was not a creature of the depths.

Son showed him.

She slipped under and breathed as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. Then she surfaced again, spat water, and coughed hard to force the last remnants from her lungs. It looked unpleasant, no, unpleasant is struck, it looked terrible. Roto stared at her, half fascinated, half revolted. Still, he went under again.

He could not inhale the water.

Not really.

Then, underwater, a blow struck him in the side. Short, precise, just strong enough to startle him. Reflex took over. He opened his mouth and pulled water in. At once he tried to surge upward, to force everything back out, but Indra held him down with one hand. The two women exchanged a look, and Roto realized this was not the first time they had made someone learn water breathing this way.

Overcoming was everything.

When he stopped fighting and finally understood he was not drowning, Indra released him and swam on. Both women moved ahead, and Roto followed, still grappling with this impossible breathing and the equally impossible act of swimming. They demonstrated with clipped movements how he had to use the new webs, how to pull with his arms, steer with his legs, keep his body narrow. They were far superior, smoother, more natural, but it did not take long before he at least understood how to get in a direction without simply flailing through the current like a fool.

When they were ready, Son signaled to the Kaula, who were already waiting, that they could go.

The Kaula swam first.

And they followed.

At first they moved above coral banks, through glittering, living water where everything looked brighter and stranger than on the surface. Roto saw colors he had never named. He saw schools of fish that streamed past like living cloth, and plants that moved like breathing creatures. Then they reached the edge of the reef, and from there it dropped into the blue depths.

That was when Roto understood this was not only a reef.

It was far more.

What rose and descended before him was a whole construct of rock, pillars, arches, openings, and carvings, with a graceful beauty that could not possibly have grown by chance. They drifted down along something so vast, so alien, and yet so complete, that for a moment Roto forgot to swim. Life swarmed everywhere. Between arches and stone, animals darted. Veils of plants draped themselves over walls, as if the sea had decided not to swallow this city, but to adorn it.

He understood, all at once, that this was the underwater equivalent of a city.

Only far more beautiful.

They dove deeper, and he almost lost the group, so captivated was he by the sight. Only when Son glanced back and snapped a sharp gesture at him to come closer did he wrench himself free and continue. At last they reached a plateau and glided along its edge. On the left, a wall rose, black and marked with forms Roto could not interpret. On the right, everything fell away into those dark depths where the water lost its color and took on something bottomless.

Then they came to an opening.

Statues framed it, and behind it, light shimmered.

The group swam in, then angled upward, until they reached a slanted ramp where they could slowly climb out of the water. The moment Roto was half out, he doubled over. He coughed water from his lungs in spasms, tears streaming down his face, and he cursed everything that had ever been wet. Indra thumped his back a few times until he could finally breathe again.

Son smiled at him.

“Later again.”

Then she laughed louder at his accusing look.

“You will get used to it.”

They moved on.

The cavern was huge, and the glow came from the walls themselves. Some stalactites hanging from the ceiling gave off a gentle light, so the whole space shimmered from within. The Kaula led them to a niche where one of their own lay on a bier. Half asleep, half delirious, he moaned to himself. His wife knelt beside him. She carefully pulled back a kind of blanket of algae and exposed a wound at his flank, between belly and chest.

The three mages froze.

The wound was completely black.

It did not bleed. It did not weep. And yet it was worse than any open injury. The flesh around it had begun to darken too, and so had the veins visible beneath the skin. A rotten stench rolled off it, heavy and foul, as if something there was not merely decaying, but spreading.

The three looked at one another, helpless.

“Sword,” said one of the Kaula, miming the thrust.

At once they thought of Anadar.

Or of something that had wounded with the same kind of force.

They had never seen anything like it. They spoke in low voices. None of them was an earth mage. None of them had Isidre’s experience with wounds, poisons, and things that burrowed between body and magic. In the end they reached the same conclusion. If anything could still be done, someone like Isidre had to see this.

That left only one problem: persuading the Kaula to bring the injured man to Tandor.

And that quickly proved difficult.

They tried to explain that they could not help here, that they needed someone with deeper knowledge, that the man would die if they simply stayed and stared at him. But the more they spoke, the more the Kaula’s frustration turned to anger, and anger to hostility. Tension thickened in the air. Bodies tightened. Hands went to knives. Voices hardened.

Then three tentacles rose from the depths.

What slid out of the water before them stole the mages’ breath. It was the kraken. Enormous, old, alien, with a presence that reordered the whole chamber in a single instant. The Kaula around them calmed immediately.

One tentacle was extended toward the mages.

At first they did not understand what it meant. Then Son stepped forward, grasped it faster than the others, and held out her arm. The tentacle wrapped around it. Her face tightened in pain for a moment, then it was done. Indra followed, then Roto.

Two days later, the ship was on its way back to the mainland.

Aboard were the three mages, the injured Kaula, his wife, and four more Kaula. Kral watched the whole affair from a distance. Part of him regretted that this adventure was likely nearing its end. Roto, meanwhile, understood far better what must have happened back then beneath the tower of the water mages. He smiled to himself at the thought that Grot had probably been closer to the truth than any of them had believed, and that he would rather do a devil’s work than ever tell him so.

But the wound troubled him.

It kept blackening. More than that, it seemed to spread, almost to live, as if something inside the flesh did not die, but only kept reaching. The injured Kaula suffered terrible pain. More than once he screamed in his language, loud, twisted, full of hate and agony, and no one on board understood a word of it.

But everyone understood the pain.

24

He had become a name by now.Not just a man who lived, ate, learned, and slept in the halls of Sahretûn, but a name others spoke with that clipped respect which, in this fortress, carried more weight than any friendliness. Master of Sahretûn, Fantor. That was what they called him, and with time even he had begun to wear it as if it were a second skin.

He should have been satisfied.He was not.

Not because anything was missing that could be neatly named. He had access to the rites, to the protective chambers, to the circles of metal, to the lists of names, to the staves, to the rules. He had called the Horned. He had bound them. He no longer let their presence grind him to dust the way it had at the beginning, when every summons gnawed at him and every voice in his head felt like a blade. He had become stronger. More practiced. Colder.

And yet there was that tiny, nagging feeling that Sahretûn still did not quite let him in.Like a house you are allowed to live in, but whose doors you never truly know.

He had learned not to ask too much. This city rewarded curiosity only when it dressed itself in form. One wrong tone, one wrong look, and even a master could suddenly feel like an initiate again. Fantor had grown used to breaking his hunger for knowledge into patience, into routine, into practice, into the same daily walking of the corridors he was permitted to use.

Until Naaarstr spoke again.

It did not happen on some grand night, not with thunder, not with a vision. It happened in the middle of an ordinary morning, when Fantor stood in one of the inner chambers, his hands already smeared with chalk and oil, and the stillness around him was so dense he could count his own breath.

“Are you satisfied?”

The voice was old.And yet it felt as if it had spent years waiting to surface again at precisely this place.

Fantor froze so abruptly that a drop of oil fell from his fingers onto the floor and ate into the line like a black point.

He had not thought of the sword for a long time. Of Anadar. The metal. The binding. The demon trapped in an object like a curse trapped in a ring. Why would he. In Sahretûn, demons were not legend but craft. He called ones greater than Naaarstr, older, crueler, louder in their power.

And still it was this one voice that tightened his throat at once.

“Where are you,” Fantor thought, without moving his lips.

A short, hoarse laugh, made of mockery rather than joy.“They took me away. Into places you cannot reach.”

For a breath, Fantor was only rage. Bare, useless, then pushed down at once.

“That is impossible,” he thought back. “I am a master.”

“Master of Sahretûn, Fantor,” Naaarstr said softly, savoring the title. “And you still do not know how large this city truly is.”

Then the voice fell silent again, as if it had wanted only to plant that one thing inside him. A barb. A seed. A thought that could not be cut out.

Fantor stood motionless for a moment.And felt something shift inside him.

He had believed he had reached the top, the edge of what Sahretûn could give a man. Now he felt how ridiculous that certainty had been. Not because he had overestimated himself. But because Sahretûn had deliberately let him believe there was only this world, these corridors, these chambers.

In the days that followed, he began to listen.For steps that did not belong to the usual hours. For a door that closed too softly to be a door. For shadows that clung a moment too long to a wall. For those tiny deviations in the rhythm of a fortress built so strictly that every deviation was already a message.

He began to draw plans.Not officially. Not as work. For himself.

He set lines. Marked where stairs must be if the rooms behind were logically built. Where a corridor ended even though, by measure, it should have reached farther. Where a wall was too smooth. Too fresh. Too clean.

And again and again he struck the same boundary.

He walked the corridor he knew to the place where the stone felt like an end, and yet every instinct in him insisted there was space behind it. He put his hand on the wall. Cold. Still. Unyielding.

He asked.Carefully.

At one of the evening meals, with Olven opposite him as always, his face calm, his gaze as difficult to read as ever.

“In Sahretûn,” Fantor began, forcing the question to sound casual, “there are corridors I cannot find.”

Olven looked at him as if he had spoken a sentence not worth answering.

Fantor smiled as if he had merely shared an observation.

“It is strange,” he continued. “Sometimes I think the city shifts.”

Olven took a sip, set the cup down, and remained silent.

No yes.No no.No excuse. No mockery to shrink the question into something harmless.

Only silence.

And that silence told Fantor more than any answer. It was not ignorance. It was a boundary that was not negotiated.

Fantor swallowed the sting.

Later he asked again, wrapped differently, of another master on another day. He received the same look. The same blankness. The same refusal to grant the thought even a word.

No one said anything.No one.

As if naming those doors was itself a breach.

So he did what he had always done.Practice. Grow.

Call the Horned and learn to pull their voices out of his skull like splinters from flesh. He called them with limitations, with bindings back, with safeguards. He let them stand in the chamber, tall and grinning, while their will pressed against his mind like a foreign weight. He forced them back. He forced himself to remain upright. More than once he nearly broke, and more than once others had to intervene, closing the chaos before Sahretûn itself was harmed.

He was ashamed of it.And turned shame into discipline.

With time he improved.

He began to see the Horned not only as danger but as pattern. Each had a way of pressing into the mind. One was like fire that wanted to devour at once. Another was like ice, not burning but suffocating. One came with temptation. One with ridicule. One with a gentle voice that was the most dangerous because it sounded so reasonable.

Fantor learned them.He knew their names.He knew how they reacted to certain formulations.He knew with which one the pressure eased fastest if he tightened the circle at one place.He knew which one liked to hide in silence and then suddenly strike with a single sentence like a knife.

And somewhere in that routine, in that daily struggle, he began to notice something others did not.

A gap.

Not in the circles.Not in the binding lines.In the assumption.

Everyone in Sahretûn summoned demons as an endpoint. You called. You forced. You bound. You banished. You let go. That was the order.

Fantor asked himself why.

He waited several days until the thought settled inside him, until it no longer sounded like a sudden arrogance but like a question that wanted to become inevitable.

Then he acted.

He chose a One Horned he knew well. Not because it was harmless, but because Fantor understood how it moved. How it pressed. How it lied. Where its limits were.

He called it.

The circle held. The demon stepped through, slim and alert, with that false smile that pretended everything was play.

Fantor laid restrictions on it, many, tight, clean. Not to boast. To control. Everything was shaped so the demon could do what Fantor demanded, but nothing beyond it.

Then Fantor spoke the sentence no one in Sahretûn had ever spoken aloud.

“Summon a demon for yourself.”

For a heartbeat, everything went still.So still Fantor heard his own blood in his ears.

The One Horned raised its head.

In its eyes there was first mockery. Then something else. Something Fantor had never seen there.

Hesitation.

Because a demon summoning a demon was not an ordinary transgression. It was a step toward rules older than their games, rules that even beings of the Deep recognized by scent.

The One Horned wanted to protest.

The restrictions did not allow it.

It began to murmur. Not the human tongue. Not the language of names Fantor had spoken. Something deeper, more sound than word, and the air in the chamber changed as if the room itself held its breath.

Fantor felt something open.Not a gate in stone.A connection in principle.

And in that very moment, shock struck him.

Because he understood what he was doing.

He banished the One Horned back, almost in panic, so quickly the binding line flickered under the force of his will. The demon vanished.

And with it, the second call that had only just been born collapsed as well.

Silence.

Fantor stood in the circle and felt his heart racing.

He had done it.And he had stopped it.

But the thought could not be caged again. For one breath, the world had shown him it was possible.

He left the chamber like a man listening inward, trying to hear whether he had just set something unforgivable in motion.

And as he moved through the corridors, he noticed it.

A door that had not been there before.

Not visibly formed. Not grown out of the stone.

It was simply there, in a place where there had been only wall.

Fantor stopped.He stepped closer.

The stone was not fresh. Not new. It was as if it had always been this way, and only his gaze had been forbidden to grasp it.

He laid his hand on the place.

The stone gave.

Not soft, but like a boundary that suddenly decided to let him pass.

Fantor stepped through.

The corridor beyond was narrow and dark, yet clearly part of the fortress. It smelled of the same cold dust, the same metal, the same smoke of the fires that never truly died in Sahretûn.

He went on.

And found another passage.And another.

Like a net hidden beneath the net.

Then he met the first of them.

They stood in the corridor so still that he only saw them when he was already too close to pretend he had merely wandered here by accident.

Black robes, as was customary in Sahretûn.

But their hoods were lined with violet on the inside, and that violet was not decoration but sign. The color of something that did not need to display itself because it knew itself.

They looked at him.

Not hostile.Not friendly.

Assessing.

As if they had known all along he would come.

One stepped forward.

“Lord of Sahretûn, Fantor,” he said, and in the word lord there was something Fantor had never heard from these people. Not rank. Not title. Something else.

Belonging.

Fantor swallowed.

“Who are you,” he asked quietly.

The man lifted a hand, and behind him the others moved in perfect unison, like a unit that needed no commands.

“We are a circle,” he said. “A ring you do not find as long as you only walk where you are allowed to walk.”

Fantor felt his pulse jump again.

“And why,” he asked, “do you call me lord.”

A brief smile flashed, not warm, but satisfied.

“Because you have done something only a few think,” the man said. “And fewer still dare.”

Fantor knew he could lie now.Pretend he did not know what they meant.

But in Sahretûn he had learned that lies work only when they are shaped better than truth. And he was too awake, too torn open by what had just happened, to build such a shape.

So he said nothing.

The silence was enough.

The man stepped closer, just far enough that Fantor could see the violet edge of the hood clearly.

“Come,” he said. “You have breathed long enough in the upper rooms. If you are already hunting for doors, then we will show you the ones that truly exist.”

Fantor hesitated for a heartbeat.

Not from fear.

From knowing that this was the step after which there would be no return to the comfortable not knowing.

Then he went.

And while the men in violet lined hoods led him down into the depths, Fantor understood that Naaarstr’s voice had not returned to soothe him or warn him.

It had returned to lure him.

And he had followed.

25

Some decisions no one makes for you.

Slonda thought that often in those days. Perhaps more often than he liked. He had wrestled with himself for a long time, a very long time. He wanted that knowledge. Not halfway. Not only up to the threshold where others claimed enough had been reached. He wanted further. He did not want to stand at the lower circles and pretend they satisfied him. He watched the others when they summoned the Horned Ones. He watched how they fought the inner struggle, how they almost broke under it, how they had to bind, hold, wrestle, and finally prevail. And that was exactly what he wanted too.

But it was denied to him.

Marabar would not give him that knowledge.

And the bitter part was not only the refusal itself, but that Slonda understood the reason. Perhaps it was wise. Perhaps it was even right. But right and bearable were rarely the same thing. Slonda did not want that knowledge out of greed for power. Not to tower over others. Not to make himself greater than he was. He wanted it for knowledge’s sake. Because it existed. Because it lay before him. Because he sensed that within those circles of summoning there was something decided, something that would open not only the school of Sahretûn to him, but the world itself.

So he did what he always did when something was withheld from him.

He practiced.

He kept his routines. Worked cleanly. Refined what he had already been given. Became better at binding, surer in the call, calmer in his stance, clearer in his perception of what happened inside a circle before it was fully spoken. Yet right in front of his nose there was more, and that more made him hungry. It was as if he sat before a door with light leaking from beneath it, and everyone told him the room beyond was not meant for him yet. At some point his curiosity won.

He would have been glad if someone had taken the decision from him.

But no one did.

So one day he sat again over the constellations and passages, not out of mere habit, but with a purpose he did not admit to himself at first. He tested the lines. The openings. The shifts. How close certain currents ran to certain places and times. And at last he found what he had been seeking. A good passage. One that would open soon. Straight into Gontar, only a few decades earlier. And almost a similar passage, only a few weeks later, led back to Sahretûn.

When that became clear to him, he smiled.

At first only because he understood the mathematical allure of it. Then, as his gaze rested on the maps and calculations, because he suddenly knew what he had only suspected before. The exact location of Sahretûn. The mountain range that marked the end of the desert. Black. Volcanic. And the city itself built in a crater, hidden, sealed, nearly impossible to find from the outside. Not simply a city in the desert. A city inside an ancient fire.

That was when his resolve matured.

He went to Marabar.

The summoner sat in their shared room, the staff beside him, a book on his knees. He lifted his gaze as Slonda entered and recognized at once from Slonda’s face that this would not be a casual conversation.

“Master of Time, Slonda,” he said calmly. “You come with a decision.”

“Yes.”

“In whose favor did it fall. Your prudence, or your curiosity.”

“Perhaps,” Slonda said, “the two are not always as cleanly separable as you like to claim.”

Marabar closed the book.

“Then speak.”

Slonda stepped closer. He showed him the passages and let it work on him. Marabar’s gaze moved over it first with the controlled calm Slonda knew from him. Then something changed. Not large. Not visible to everyone. Only a slight tightening around the eyes. A gathering that sat deeper.

“Knowledge for knowledge,” Slonda said. “Trust for trust.”

Marabar said nothing.

“You wanted to see the heart of my art,” Slonda continued. “Not only its edges. Not only its constellations, its rhythms, and its way of thinking. You wanted movement. The crossing. The actual step. I told you I would not show it to you.”

“You did.”

“And you refused me the Horned Ones in return.”

“That as well.”

Slonda nodded toward the sheets.

“Here is my offer.” He pointed at the luminous system before them. “I show you the passage. A single one. One that you calculate, and that I verify for you to work yourself. There and back. You see how it happens. You experience what it means. And afterward you instruct me in the Horned Ones.”

Marabar pressed his fingertips together.

“That is not a small offer.”

“No.”

“And not a small demand.”

“No.”

Marabar looked at the passages. Then again. He tested the lines, the angles, the openings, asked questions, had Slonda explain individual points. Slonda let him recalculate everything, test everything, refute everything that could be refuted.

In the end Marabar leaned back.

“If this holds,” he said softly, “then you show me not only a movement. You show me that the threshold can be entered at all without everything tearing.”

“I know.”

“And you place it in my hand.”

Marabar looked at him for a long time.

Slonda held his gaze.

“Because I do not want to stand in front of a door any longer and pretend its shadow is enough for me.”

A very narrow smile crossed Marabar’s face.

Then both fell silent.

Not out of uncertainty. Rather because they both knew that in this moment something had slipped out of the balance they had held in shape for a long time. At last Marabar said:

“Good. Knowledge for knowledge. Trust for trust.”

A few weeks later they stood at the place from which they would make the crossing.

Slonda had chosen it with care. Not in the innermost heart of the city. Not too close to eyes that asked too many questions. Not at a spot that would make the jump harder than it needed to be. The wind moved low over the ground. The air was still enough that the lines Marabar drew lay on the earth like dark scars.

Marabar cast the spell.

Not Slonda.

That had been part of the agreement. Marabar was to take the step himself. Not as a spectator. As the one acting.

When the circle stood, Marabar looked at him once more.

“If I arrive on the other side broken,” he said, “I will not thank you.”

“I do not expect you to.”

“And if I arrive cleanly.”

“Then afterward I will claim I never truly doubted.”

Marabar snorted softly. Then he stepped into the lines.

Slonda went first.

The passage did not tear like fire or light. It did something far more unpleasant. For an instant it took the body’s every safe relationship to place, weight, and sequence. Slonda knew it. For him it was still bad enough, but no longer foreign. He stepped through, came out on the other side in Gontar, only a few decades earlier, and waited with a sour feeling in his stomach.

Then Marabar came.

Slonda saw at once how all control left him. The summoner doubled over, dropped to one knee, then onto both hands, and vomited violently onto the ground. His face had gone gray. His breath came in jolts. For a moment he looked not like the controlled, sharp edged Marabar, but like a man whose order of the world had been pulled out from under his feet.

Slonda smiled.

Not cruelly. But with that small, satisfied smile of the one who had been right.

“Master of Sahretûn, Marabar,” he said, bending down toward him, “if you wish, I can share the highly scientific finding that this does indeed happen on first journeys.”

Marabar lifted his head and glared at him with a rage that was still too weak to cut properly.

“When I can speak again,” he managed, “I will convey to you a form of contempt that may add a new flavor to our acquaintance.”

“That delights me.”

Slonda helped him up.

He almost carried him back. Not far, but far enough that Marabar could sit, drink, and fight the aftereffects. It took three days before the summoner was truly himself again. In those three days Slonda learned something that quietly pleased him. Marabar too had limits. Marabar’s art too was not prepared for everything. Marabar too could be humbled by a foreign order.

On the way back Marabar managed better already.

He still doubled over again. Lost what dignity one can keep while negotiating with the contents of one’s stomach. But he recovered this time after a day, not after three.

With that, the exchange was fulfilled.

And Marabar kept his word.

From then on Slonda was initiated into the secrets of the Horned Ones.

Not all at once. Not lightly. Not with a generosity that would have bordered on stupidity. But truly. Marabar remained his teacher throughout. He taught him what was necessary to hold the Horned Ones. Not only to summon, but to endure. Not only to draw binding circles, but to secure the mind. Not only to set limits, but to remain under the pressure of a being older, hungrier, cleverer, and more patient than the lesser demons in every regard.

The first summonings broke him.

Not only physically. Internally.

They went wrong. Circles held too briefly. Words slipped out of order though he technically knew them. Once he did not confuse the formula, only the focus of his attention, and that alone was enough for the presence of the summoned being to push deeper into him than he had allowed. He lay afterward trembling on the ground, his mouth full of blood from bitten lips, and Marabar stood above him and said only:

“Again.”

And so he grew better at it.

Stronger.

Not proud. Not certain. But capable of bearing it. He learned to withstand the pressure, to not lose the inner struggle, to recognize the first wave of fascination, dread, and desire in himself before it bent him the wrong way. Marabar was relentless in this. Never cruel for cruelty’s sake, but completely unmoved by the idea that one might spare a student in a matter like this.

So Slonda finally began to learn what lay beyond the lower circles.

End book 7

Epilogue

When Slonda returned to Gontar, to the tower of the time mages, he found, to his own astonishment, that it was no longer raining.

That alone unsettled him more than it probably should have. After so long in Sahretûn, in corridors of black stone, beneath a sky that in his memory consisted only of fire, night, and alien constellations, he had almost expected to find the world here unchanged. Yet not only had the rain vanished. Even the ruffs had gone out of fashion. People still spoke in that stilted manner that, after all these years, had become familiar enough that he no longer flinched inwardly at every second sentence, but something about everything felt shifted.

He returned the books to the library.

Not without a faint unease, because the moment he entered the high halls he realised the faces were unfamiliar. The shelves still stood, the stairways, the galleries, the stone window arches. All of that he knew. And yet a subtle displacement lay over the place, the kind that appears only when it has not been a year, not two, but half a human lifetime.

When he finally asked, he was told with polite matter of factness that almost fifty years had passed since his departure.

Fifty.

He had to swallow that.

He himself did not feel truly aged. Mages aged differently than ordinary people, at least some did. Some withered as quickly as anyone, that was true, but others were carried by their art in a way that denied the body the right to fall apart in the usual order. Slonda did not feel the years as a burden. More as knowledge. As layers. As additional tension in the mind. And still, the number landed like a blow.

He sat in his tower and drank tea.

It seemed to him as though perhaps a year or two had gone by. Not fifty. Not a single day of it had been dull. Not in Gontar, not in Sahretûn, not in the black circles of summoning, not in the conversations with Marabar, not in the struggle with the Horned Ones. And now he sat here again, as if the world, while he had been moving through its deeper folds, had simply kept breathing above and kept getting older.

But what was time, really, to a time mage.

A sound at the door below tore him from the thought.

Not loud. Just definite enough that he knew it was not the wind, and not some lost student who had taken a wrong turn on the stair. He set the cup aside, stood, and went down. When he opened the door, he went still for a moment.

Mother stood before him.

Golden and beautiful as ever.

Not merely beautiful in the ordinary sense in which pretty people are called pretty, but with that peculiar, almost unreal beauty that always brought something into a room that went beyond mere form. She smiled at him, and her hair shimmered in the light as if it carried the last remnant of a day everyone else had long since lost.

“Master Slonda,” she said, “how lovely to find you here. I have been waiting for your return for a long time. May I.”

Without truly waiting for an answer, she stepped across the threshold into the tower.

Slonda let her in.

At once he recognised her presence again. He knew it, beyond doubt. And yet it was not entirely as he remembered. It was there, warm and bright and held within itself, but beneath that brightness lay something harder. Something that made him attentive. Not hostility. Not even coldness. More the trace of someone who had walked through things that forced her to draw tighter around herself.

They went upstairs.

Slonda set water to boil and prepared tea, and soon they sat opposite one another in the tower room, cups between them, as if they were two old acquaintances who had found each other again by chance after a long absence. At first they spoke of trivialities. Of Gontar. Of the weather. Of the school. Of things not important enough to truly mean, yet useful enough to measure the space between two stronger sentences.

Then Mother set her cup down.

And her gaze grew clearer.

“Master Slonda,” she said, “you possess knowledge that I need. And I wonder whether you would be willing to share it with me.”

Slonda felt something tighten in him at once.

Summoning knowledge.

Of course.

He did not even form the words to refuse her. The decision arrived faster than any sentence. That knowledge was too dangerous. For anyone. Perhaps especially for someone like her. He was already gathering himself inwardly, ready to seal his mind against questions and probing touches.

Then she lifted a hand, dismissive.

Very lightly.

Almost amused.

As if she had sensed his movement before he had finished thinking it.

“Slonda,” she said with a small smile, “I am asking you for nothing of that kind. I demand no formulas. No names. No circles. No binding phrases. Not even your memories of what is taught within those walls.”

She leaned forward a little.

“I only want to know where Sahretûn lies. And how the fortress is built. The layout of the corridors. The courtyards. The chambers. I need a ground plan.”

Now it was Slonda who looked at her for a long time.

Long enough that her smile changed slightly.

Not smaller. Just quieter.

“A ground plan,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“You ask for little,” he said, “if one listens only to the words. And for very much, if one listens to what they make possible.”

Mother did not answer at once.

Then she said softly, “I know.”

Slonda lifted his cup again, without drinking.

“And for what,” he asked at last, “do you need a path into the city of the summoners.”

She raised her gaze to him.

And in her eyes there was, all at once, nothing trivial left.

Only intent.

And history.