Anadar VIII/II

8

Anadar rode upright and without any visible haste into Ashambrat. His posture alone said enough. He did not come like a petitioner. Not like an envoy who had to hope for admission. He came like someone who knew that the gates would be opened to him because it was wiser to do so.

At the city gate, he was stopped nonetheless.

“Who seeks entry,” one of the guards snapped at him, trying to sound sharp, trying to sound vigilant, and in that very effort there already lay more uncertainty than authority.

Anadar brought his horse to a halt and looked at the man calmly. Then he drew his cloak back a little, just far enough for the other to recognise him better.

“My name is Master Anadar of the Fiery Fortress,” he said. “Master Hokn`f is expecting me.”

He did not say it loudly. Not threateningly. Only with that simple self evidence which often weighed heavier than any sharpness.

The guard looked around uneasily. Anadar could almost see the two conflicting duties wrestling within the man. The order to let no one pass unchecked. And the wish, at any cost, not to get into trouble with this man in particular.

“What is going on here.”

A second man stepped forward. The figure seemed vaguely familiar to Anadar, though he could not place him at once. The man studied him, and then late recognition set in.

“Master Anadar,” he said quickly. “Come through, please. Come into the shade. Give us the opportunity to report your arrival, so that everything can be prepared at the school.”

Anadar only smiled briefly.

“I think I am expected,” he said. “And we should not waste unnecessary time. I know the way.”

With that, he set his horse in motion again.

He did not ride quickly. Just slowly enough that the guards could send word ahead. Just swiftly enough that no one gained too much time to prepare anything properly. That was enough for him.

As he rode through the streets, he let his gaze wander.

Ashambrat had changed.

Not just a little. Not only in that quiet way in which cities shift over the years. No. Something about it was tense. Drawn inward. As if the city itself had learned to hunch its shoulders and wait for the next blow. There were fewer people in the streets than before. Fewer merchants, fewer children, less loose shouting. Instead, there were more squads. Armed squads. Not only city guards. Mages too, and some of them wore weapons at their hips with an air of importance that already revealed they had only recently decided that handling them was now supposed to matter.

Anadar had already observed this awkwardness from above, when he had approached the city in another shape. Small groups of mages marching as though determination could be replaced by step sequence. Men and women carrying swords or spears and looking as if they had only recently convinced themselves that such things now belonged to them. A single troop of good fire mages, Anadar thought, could probably wear this city down in a short time.

Probably.

He did not like the thought. Not only because it might be true. But because that vortex spell he had been able to observe from a distance gave him some concern. It was crude. Unclean. But not harmless.

So Anadar continued to observe as much as he could while riding through the streets, past the gardens, up to the courtyard where Hokn`f had now established his seat. From the movement all around, he could already sense that word of his arrival had spread. Everywhere there was hectic activity. People vanished through doors. Others ran across courtyards. One message chased the next.

He ignored it all and only dismounted in the courtyard.

At that exact moment, Hokn`f stepped out of the school.

Of course he remained standing above on the landing beneath the columns.

Games.

Anadar could play games too.

He did not allow himself to be lured up to him immediately. Instead, he first knelt down, as though he had discovered dust or dirt on his boots during the ride, and wiped it away with calm thoroughness. He knew that Hokn`f was watching him. He also knew that every unnecessary second up there on the stairs irritated the man a little more.

Only then did he climb the steps.

He left his horse standing in the middle of the courtyard. Someone would take care of it.

Hokn`f now came toward him, with a broad smile and that practised warmth men manage especially well when they would most like to be rid of the other man at once.

“Master Anadar,” he said. “What an honour to welcome you here in Ashambrat.”

He extended his hand.

Anadar took it.

“Master Hokn`f,” he replied. “When a brother calls for help so urgently, I can hardly say no.”

The sentence landed. Anadar saw it at once. Not deeply. Only in the smallest hardening around the mouth, in the barely perceptible pause in the eyes, in the trace of irritation that flickered across Hokn`f’s face before he buried it again beneath courtesy.

Anadar released his hand and moved his head a little, as though loosening his neck.

“A hard ride to get here,” he complained with that casual tiredness which in truth served only to take the first question out of the other man’s hand.

“Come inside, Master, come inside,” Hokn`f said quickly. “You know Tzadier.”

He gestured toward a gaunt mage beside him.

Anadar looked at him briefly, nodded, and said with perfect courtesy:

“Master Tzadier. I am pleased.”

Courtesy could sometimes do no harm, he thought. Especially not with people who did not quite know whether they were being honoured or examined.

They entered the pleasantly cool interior of the school.

“You come alone,” Hokn`f asked. “I thought your student, Master Morgut, would accompany you.”

There it was.

Not only the question. The attempt behind it too.

Anadar felt something in his mind, a clumsy movement, not even especially subtle. A probing. Too crude to become truly dangerous to him. Inwardly, he almost had to smile. He let nothing show.

“Morgut,” he said as calmly as possible, “is distracted. You know him. He found something in Zoordak that occupies him. He is young, and perhaps I am not the strictest teacher.”

He lied lightly. Cleanly. Without inner sharpness. A lie was only a lie if it was uncovered. Otherwise, it was often merely a form of order.

And at the same time, he noticed what flickered behind Hokn`f’s face.

Irritation.

Only slight.

But enough.

It confirmed to Anadar that Hokn`f knew nothing about Morgut’s whereabouts. That was good. Or more precisely, it was less bad than it might have been.

“Tell me, Master Hokn`f,” Anadar then asked as if in passing. “Is my good friend Gnok in the city? I would like to pay my respects to him.”

That struck completely unexpectedly.

Anadar knew it the moment he asked the question. And what then rose in Hokn`f was harder to interpret than the matter with Morgut. It was not simple surprise. Not merely annoyance. Rather something smaller, quickly pushed away before it could take shape.

“Master Gnok?” said Hokn`f. “I have not seen the old owl for some time. Surely you can look in on him later. But let us discuss the situation first.”

There was something there.

At once.

Anadar did not know exactly what. But Gnok was not simply absent.

“Do you already know,” Hokn`f continued, “when the fire mages from the Fiery Fortress will arrive? Have they already set out?”

“Manador is having them mobilised,” Anadar said. “That usually does not take too long. When he sends them is the commander’s affair, and I am not the commander.”

By now they had reached the hall Hokn`f had arranged for himself.

A large, cool chamber.

Beautifully furnished.

Maps on the walls. Plans on the tables. Markings. Sketches. Notes. Models. On one of the larger tables lay a representation of the city, farther out a stylised pyramid in the desert, paths, lines, arrows, movements. Hokn`f had created a strategic centre for himself, and with that demonstrative care meant to radiate not only overview, but importance as well.

Anadar looked at the maps, the little figures, the markings, and smiled briefly.

“Well then,” he said. “What do you need us for at all? This all looks very professional. Why do you not simply march out and sweep this desert people from the face of the planet?”

He provoked him deliberately only a little.

Just enough to hear how he would answer.

Just enough for it still to pass as mocking camaraderie.

Yet in truth, he had already understood that almost nothing here was as it had been described to him. Not the mood of the city. Not the mages. Not the questions about Morgut. Not the matter of Gnok. Not the all too well prepared war centre. Not the nervous haste with which his arrival had both been reported and controlled.

Too much did not fit.

Later, he withdrew under the pretext that he needed to refresh himself from the ride and wash the dust from his face and hands. Hardly was he alone for a moment when he stood still and let the impressions crash down upon him.

Nothing here was as it should be.

Gnok was not here.

Morgut was not here.

The story he had been told was not the true story.

And somewhere beneath it lay something that was already rotting.

Anadar slowly lifted his head and took one deep breath.

They would get to the bottom of this.

Very soon.

9

They did not quite know what to do with him.

Morgut was a prisoner of the Sondra, only one without chains, without a cell, and without those clear boundaries that at least give captivity a simple shape. No one had beaten him. No one had shackled him. Yet neither had anyone granted him any right. He sat in a chamber, clean, cool and quiet, and with every hour he felt more clearly that the Sondra did not know how to place him. Perhaps that was more dangerous than open hostility.

His capture had been peaceful. He had expressed the wish to speak with someone who carried responsibility, and they had asked him whether he came from Ashambrat and whether he knew those mages who had attacked the valley. He had been forced to answer yes to both. But then he had explained that he did not belong to Hokn`f, but rather to his opposite, and after that they had left him alone.

Now he waited.

From time to time, one of the Sondra came by, cast a glance into the chamber and disappeared again without saying a word. That was all. No questions. No accusation. No decision. Only silence and observation. With time, Morgut began to doubt. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come here. Perhaps he had removed himself from the game precisely at the moment when his sister needed him most urgently. The thought kept creeping back into him, and each time he pushed it away without ever truly getting rid of it.

Time passed.

How much exactly, he could not say. Perhaps a day. Perhaps a little more. The chamber allowed for no certain reckoning, and his unrest gnawed away at every inner clock. The longer he waited, the stronger his concern for Gudi became. What was happening in Ashambrat while he sat here and could do nothing. What was Hokn`f doing in these hours. What was happening with Okom. What with Gnok.

Then they came for him.

Two tall Sondra appeared silently at the door and indicated that he should follow. Morgut rose at once. In the very first steps, he sensed that he was now being led deeper into the inside of the pyramid, or perhaps higher, that was not easy to tell at first, since everything around him seemed ordered and confusing at the same time.

The inside of the pyramid was not hollow.

Rather, it was threaded through with supports, shafts, walls, halls and ramps, connected to one another in an order whose logic Morgut did not immediately understand. Great rooms opened, then narrow passages again. Chambers and living spaces lay within the outer wall. There were storage areas, waterways, places of gathering, small workrooms and broad levels that evidently served several purposes at once. And to move between individual heights, there were lifts inside, simple but effective constructions with which one could rise or descend across several storeys.

The Sondra led him onward in silence.

From level to level he climbed, and more and more he marvelled at what he saw. Everything was practical. Not bare, not poor, but free of every ornament that wished only to please itself. Crates full of vegetables and fruit stood neatly stacked in cooler areas. Water ran through channels carefully set into the structure. There were sleeping rooms, communal areas, workshops. Everywhere one could see that a people lived here who had not merely hidden themselves, but who had preserved order, endurance and dignity within their hiding place.

The higher they climbed, the tenser Morgut became.

When they finally reached the upper levels, he noticed at once that they were now close to the summit of the pyramid. They led him outside, and there he saw that the uppermost two storeys were not overgrown from the outside. From up here, he could look down onto the lower terraces, which were green throughout, so dense and soft that from this height they almost seemed like one vast field, were it not for the dizzying breadth.

He stepped to the edge and looked north.

Nothing but desert.

No sign of Ashambrat, no smoke, no tower, no movement, only sand and shimmering distance as far as the eye could reach. They led him once around the summit, and everywhere the image was the same. Desert. World. Emptiness. Vastness.

Then the two Sondra pointed to a final stairway that led even farther upward.

Morgut climbed.

Four more Sondra were waiting for him there.

They were not older in body, but older in the eyes. That was the first thing he noticed. These four radiated something that needed neither a gesture of power nor adornment. A self evident weight. Something that demanded respect before a single word had been spoken.

Morgut stopped.

For one heartbeat, he only studied them. Then he began to speak.

“Forgive me, honourable Sondra,” he said. “Forgive my intrusion and allow me to introduce myself. I am Morgut of Ashambrat, student of the magical disciplines.”

He bowed briefly.

“And I need your help. My sister Gudi has been abducted.”

As he spoke her name, a soft murmur immediately passed among the four. Not loud. Not startled. More like the swift, meaningful flare of something already known. Morgut noticed it at once. Gudi was not unknown to these people. She had told him so, and now he saw the proof before him.

“I have also been unable to find any trace of Master Gnok, who was travelling with her,” he added. “I suspect that he too has been abducted.”

The four exchanged glances Morgut could not interpret. It was not open counsel. More the silent understanding of beings who had long weighed a matter against itself on several levels and were now only testing what the new arrival knew of it.

At last, one of them spoke.

“My name is Zars,” she said. “These are Dwon, Idan and Opla. Together we form the Tadut. You might perhaps translate it as a group that leads. Perhaps.”

She paused briefly and indicated that Morgut should come with them into a small room on the final level.

The room surprised him.

Inside, it was noticeably cooler than outside. It was bright, though no visible window lay in the walls. The light seemed to come from the stone itself, or from some manner of construction Morgut did not understand. Several divans stood within, low and comfortable, and the four took their places as though this place belonged not only to counsel, but also to a form of quiet dignity.

Morgut too was told to sit.

Zars looked at him calmly.

“Tell us, Morgut of Ashambrat, student of the magical disciplines. What can you report to us about your sister?”

Morgut gathered himself.

“She was taken prisoner by Hoknf when she returned from Tandor. She had been there together with Gnok. Hoknf beat her in order to get secrets from her.”

The four looked at one another and then spoke together in a language Morgut did not know. It was a beautiful singsong, soft and precise at the same time, and although he did not understand a single word, he immediately had the feeling that this language was older than much that was considered ancient in Ashambrat.

Then Zars turned back to him.

“That explains a few things,” she said. “Your sister was a bearer of secrets. And she must have revealed them.”

The eyes of the four now rested openly on him. Not accusingly. But searchingly enough that Morgut hesitated for a brief moment. Then he nodded.

“She was in mortal danger,” he said quickly. “I do not think she could have kept much hidden.”

He heard himself how much defence lay in that sentence. Not only for his sister’s sake. For his own as well. As if he had to make clear that Gudi had not betrayed anything out of weakness, but out of pain.

Zars raised her hand and gently interrupted him.

“We understand this. It was only a matter of time, Morgut of Ashambrat. It was time for us to return and take our place in the fabric again. That was certain. Whether ten days ago or in ten days, in the end that was of no great importance. The same is true of the reaction of you mages. That too was foreseeable. We have known you for a long time.”

She let the sentence stand for a moment.

“Our true question is another,” she continued then. “Why are you here with us, Morgut of Ashambrat. What do you hope to gain from us?”

Morgut drew one deep breath.

“The city,” he said. “Ashambrat. I no longer recognise it. It has changed. The people within it are no longer the people I know. Not the teachers. Not the order. Not even the air feels as it once did.”

The four listened to him without interrupting.

Zars inclined her head only slightly.

“And what do you want from us now,” she asked. “That we fight a war for you. I think the war will soon be carried to us in any case, whether we want it or not. There is something here that he craves. Hokn`f, you say, is his name. He strives for power and suspects there is something here that can help him with that.”

Again, a pause arose.

This time longer.

Morgut felt that they had long since spoken about this among themselves, perhaps often, perhaps every night since the appearance of the mages. That his presence did not bring a new war, but only confirmed that the war was already on its way.

“We are not a warlike people, Morgut of Ashambrat,” Zars said at last. “But we fight when we must. And we will likely have to. We feel it.”

Her voice was not proud. Not defiant. Only clear.

“What can you offer us so that we help you?”

The sentence remained between them.

Morgut was silent for a moment.

He had expected many things. Mistrust. Severity. Perhaps even open rejection. But not that they would so calmly and so directly name the true currency of the world.

Not pleading.

Not pity.

Not mere common cause.

But exchange.

He looked at each of them in turn. Zars. Dwon. Idan. Opla.

Then he realised that this was perhaps the first truly important question he had been asked in days.

And that the answer might decide whether he would save his sister, or whether Ashambrat, with everything still worth living for inside it, would sink beneath Hokn`f and his madness.

10

They had agreed that Anadar would sound out the situation in the city while she first looked around outside.

So Shara rode in a wide arc around Ashambrat. It did not take long until she found what she had been looking for: larger caravans moving toward the city or leaving it again. At first she joined those riding out of the city. After a short time, she began talking to the caravan masters, unobtrusively, kindly, with precisely that mixture of openness and casual curiosity that made it easy for others to say more than they had actually intended.

In this way, little by little, she learned what was being brought to Ashambrat.

And in what quantities.

As soon as she had the information she needed, she left one caravan again without drawing attention and joined the next one heading into the city. Only rarely did anyone make a secret of what they were transporting. And Shara grew increasingly puzzled by the quantities of weapons and armour being brought to Ashambrat from everywhere. Some caravan masters reported quite openly that they were now riding into the city for the repeated time with large loads of swords, shields, spears and arrows.

Once she had recognised that, she set out to find those caravans bringing food into the city.

But there she did not find what she had expected, at least not to the same extent.

Anyone hoarding such quantities of weapons also had to be able to supply a corresponding army with everything necessary for life. Yet precisely there, something did not fit. That was the first real inconsistency she encountered. She spent several days following individual trains, picking up conversations, setting quantities against one another, until the picture slowly grew sharper.

Then she saw a column of riders in the distance.

It was the way they rode and the way they sat in the saddle that betrayed them at once. They were mages. And to her great surprise, not few of them. Even from afar, she recognised by their colours and bearing that they were mostly mages from the Life School, and beside them some from the Water Schools. One could see how uncomfortable they felt. Not all of them were made for fast, long riding. Not all of them were used to moving through the desert as marching reinforcements. And yet they were heading for Ashambrat.

But even they still did not justify the quantities of weapons Shara now suspected to be in the city.

They did not make fast progress.

Quite the opposite.

So Shara was able to put a considerable distance between herself and the group relatively easily. She had to inform Anadar of her findings as quickly as possible.

They had agreed on a signal.

On a dune in the west, she lit a brief beacon, small but visible from afar to anyone who knew what to look for. Dusk had already begun to fall when, after a very short time, a large raven flew toward her position and circled her several times. Then, still in flight, he transformed back into his human shape.

By now he could actually make it look so elegant and flowing, as though he had never done it any other way.

Shara regarded him with a hint of honest admiration.

“That is becoming more and more fluid and graceful,” she admitted.

“By now I no longer land on my stomach,” he said, sounding almost foolishly pleased.

When she noticed that he was even wearing his armour, she tapped against the leather breastplates.

“You are visibly getting better.”

He nodded. Then the lightness vanished from his face again.

“Something is wrong in the city,” he began. “It is with... I do not know... too much in one line. I cannot quite grasp it. It does not feel like a city that merely lives in fear. More like a city being directed toward something.”

Shara sat down in the sand and gestured for him to sit beside her.

“Hokn`f has had entire caravan loads of weapons brought into the city,” she said. “You could probably arm every guard in the city thirty times over with them. In addition, the Life and Water mages are only a good day’s ride away now. But even that does not explain these quantities.”

Anadar looked at her sharply at once.

“How many. Do you have an estimate.”

“Nearly eight hundred,” she said. “Perhaps a few more or fewer.”

He whistled softly through his teeth.

“That is both schools together.”

She nodded.

“Any sign of Morgut?”

“None,” she said. “Nor of Gnok.”

“The same with me,” he replied. “No sign of Morgut’s sister, and Hokn`f is hiding something. I did not want to push too deeply. But there is something concealed. And he is having his mages practise that vortex. I saw it from above.”

Shara looked at him.

“And now?”

He did not answer at once.

Instead, he drew her to him and kissed her.

“Not much more will happen tonight,” he said softly.

So they lay down beside one another in the sand, on their cloak, and looked into the cold night sky. It was one of those nights in which the silence was not empty, but filled to the brim with thoughts one did not quite speak aloud.

“I will ride south now,” Shara said at some point. “I want to take a closer look at these Sondra. After that, we should meet again before I ride to meet Manador and report to him.”

“And I will watch the surprised faces as soon as I see the troop of mages riding in,” said Anadar. “I will see whether I can learn anything more about the weapons. At the very least, he has to be storing them somewhere.”

They looked at one another for a long time.

Deeply.

For a moment, both had the same premonition that this might be the last time for a long while that they lay together like this. Both pushed the thought aside. Not because it was untrue. But because they did not need it now. They only moved closer to one another.

When the sun was already rising, they finally parted.

One last look into each other’s eyes.

One last kiss.

Then he rose and flew back toward the city in bird shape.

Shara watched him for a long time. At first he still circled above her, then he grew smaller, until finally he was only a point on the horizon. She sighed, went to the horses and rode around the city again, this time toward the south, drawing ever closer to that pyramid which she had already seen from afar on the horizon.

Here too, she began with cautious, wide circles.

She could make out nothing that rode to or from the structure. No messengers, no caravans, no armed columns. Only silence, sand, and the strangeness of that great, pale building in the middle of the desert. So she drew the circles tighter.

And came closer.

“Stop,” a female voice suddenly sounded behind her. “This far and no farther, mage.”

11

Of course he had nearly lost himself.

After Slonda had returned from Sahretûn, he had first sat down and begun to write down everything he had learned there. He did not write hastily. Not like someone who merely wants to preserve knowledge before it slips away. He wrote with the care of a man who knew exactly that every word he put to paper would carry weight. He had returned after an unspeakable fifty years. Admittedly, he had not spent the entire time there in one single straight line. Several times, he had jumped back and forth through time with Marabar. He could no longer say exactly how many years he had truly spent learning summoning. There had been several. But in the linear current of the world, fifty years had passed.

And now he was summarising what he had learned.

He made it into a work.

The work.

The only one of its kind that was to exist outside Sahretûn.

He made every single page himself. Each sheet of paper he formed by hand, rolled it, dried it, checked it for flaws and irregularities. Then he placed a spell of the School of the Mind on every page, as Mother had shown him, to make reading more difficult, or easier for the right one. After that, he wrote the summoning formulas into it. The calls. The bindings. The circles. The restrictions. Above all, however, he wrote the warnings into it. He was not foolish enough to believe that knowledge was harmless merely because it had been put into words. And so he gave it teeth and walls at the same time.

When the work was complete, he sealed it.

And from the same material, he fashioned a dagger with which that seal could be opened.

He took pains.

Great pains.

When he was finished, he was pleased with himself. Very pleased indeed. Now he only had to hide the book. And what hiding place could be better suited than the library in Tandor, whose deeper layers he knew as well as almost anyone. So he travelled to Tandor, went down into the lower regions of the library and created a niche there in one of the walls, into which he placed the work. Then he sealed the wall again and removed the hiding place from time.

No one was to gain access to this book without his knowledge.

Tandor had changed little over the centuries.

Why would it, Slonda thought. The school in general had not, the city itself only a little. The surrounding land, by contrast, had changed much more. Roads had shifted, forests had grown or vanished, villages had come and gone. Tandor itself, however, still lay there in the same grave calm, as though it had been built for time itself.

Since he had now completed one task and knew that he possessed time, for if not he, then who else, he went to the School of Necromancers, which dwelt in the same city as the earth mages. Without hesitation, he asked the dean of that time whether he might learn necromancy.

And so it happened.

Slonda expanded his knowledge with the teachings of the dead.

It even turned out that the craft suited him. Not in a cold way, but almost naturally. It was as though his mind found access even where others saw only boundary or revulsion. And so he spent several years in early Tandor and immersed himself in an art that many avoided and few truly understood.

Again and again during those years, he encountered Drinda or Pildara, sometimes Hartra as well, when they were passing through. They did not always recognise him, for they were at other points along their own line. Slonda now began to understand better what time truly was. Not merely movement. Not merely before and after. But a multiplicity of lines that touched, crossed, diverged, thickened and were lost again. The linearity of a single human being was only one thread within it. The continuum itself, however, was something else, larger, more brittle, and far less compliant than it had once seemed to him.

It was Pildara who gradually introduced him to Fons, Ko Trka and Paddi.

And so he became aware that they were only seven.

Always.

Seven time mages.

At no point were there more.

And it happened exactly once that all seven of them were gathered in the same room at the same time. This was in Tandor, during the time when Slonda was making himself into a necromancer.

Pildara stood in all her aloofness at the head of the table.

“Ladies, gentlemen,” she began.

The murmuring in the room did not fall silent at once. Some continued speaking softly, others looked in her direction only half attentively. Pildara cleared her throat. A few conversations broke off.

“And of course Hartra,” she hissed.

The giant slowly turned his head and looked at her with a sincere innocence that was always difficult to interpret in him.

“Pildara, what.”

She ordered him to be silent, an instruction he followed more reluctantly than obediently, although with Hartra it was often difficult to say whether his resistance was deliberate or merely his nature.

Pildara let her gaze glide across the gathering.

“Ladies,” she said, looking toward Ko Trka and Paddi, “as well as gentlemen. It is probably the first time, and as far as I remember...”

Nervous laughter moved through the room. It was the silent consensus among all of them not to think too precisely about time when it concerned their own position within it.

“... and probably also the only time, that all seven of us are in the same room at the same time. And as we have already agreed, it is necessary that we use this now. There are several matters to discuss.”

She paused.

“As we all know, the continuum thins out again in the future. It now appears that we are approaching a point at which jumping becomes extremely complex and risky. That means we are losing our safe insight into the future of things. Which means that we can no longer control processes we set in motion in the past in the familiar way. Circumstances will take their own course.”

Another pause.

Then she pointed to Slonda.

“Slonda has learned summoning magic. In exchange for our knowledge. This was necessary, since this art will be needed again in the time that is coming.”

For most of them, this was no longer news. Many had already received this information over the years in one way or another. But now Slonda himself rose.

He gathered himself briefly.

Then he spoke.

“It is important that we become more cautious.”

He raised his hand and created an image of Marabar before him. Not perfect, but precise enough that everyone in the room could recognise the figure. The face. The posture. The coldness.

“This summoning mage,” said Slonda, “now possesses our secrets and can use them. If you discover or observe anything unusual anywhere that is connected to this figure, make note of it and send it to me.”

With that, what had so far only hovered among them as a suspicion had been spoken aloud.

Dangerous knowledge had entered the world.

And it would do no harm to at least gather information about it.

They discussed much more that evening. Escape spaces. Temporal letterboxes. Attendance at Conclaves. Hiding places, passages, markings, agreements about who was to observe what and when, and how it should be passed on. It was not a gathering of powerful people delighting in their own greatness. It was more a circle of people who knew that they now stood at a point where caution was no longer merely a virtue, but a necessity.

When they finally parted again, they did so with a warmth such as Slonda had only rarely experienced among human beings.

Not loudly.

Not sentimentally.

But truly.

And again and again, moved by it, he thought of the circle to which he belonged.

What a chosen circle of gifted ones.

12

Everything was moving in his favour.

Hokn`f stood above his city and watched as the two other schools rode in. It was a gathering of mages such as the world had not seen for a very long time. Not only in number, but in significance. Forces moving. Schools that had come at his call. He did not need the fire mages. Not truly. He would gladly have sent them into battle first, to kill two birds with one stone. But even so, he had help. The other schools were much faster. They had set out at the first call for aid.

He let his gaze glide over the courtyard and out across the streets, then slowly descended the steps of the school to greet Dean Fontal and From.

At the top of the stairs, he paused briefly.

Beside him stood Anadar, who had returned to him early that morning.

Hoknf did not care that the fire mage was present. Let him see how his alliance bore fruit. Let him recognise that Ashambrat was no longer alone, and that at Hoknf’s call, not merely individual messengers but whole schools had been set in motion.

Fontal and From climbed down from their saddles, both exhausted from the ride through the desert, yet both immediately composed again as soon as their feet touched the ground. Hokn`f spread his arms and went toward them.

“Dean Fontal,” he said, embracing her and kissing her on the cheek. “Dean From.”

The same greeting was given to her as well.

“What a joy that you have hastened to us in our hour of need.”

Fontal looked at him and smiled briefly. Then she noticed Anadar, who was coming down the stairs behind Hokn`f. A brief shadow of unease flickered across her face, barely perceptible, but there.

“Brother Hokn`f,” she said loudly enough for everyone standing nearby to hear, “of course we hurried to you at once, to defend you and your city against external danger.”

She spoke the words carefully, and Anadar noticed at once what boundary she drew with that sentence. Help. Yes. Defence. Yes. But no unconditional submission. No word that already raised Ashambrat’s version to truth.

Then she turned to him.

“As I see, Manador has sent his most capable general. I am very curious to hear your assessment, Master Anadar.”

She extended her hand to him.

Anadar took it and raised it to his lips.

“Mistress Fontal. Once again, I am pleased to enjoy your presence.”

From, who had remained half a step aside, visibly made an effort not to be pushed to the edge by these gestures.

“We are very eager for the briefing,” she said. “And for the dangers that have arisen through these Sondra.”

Hokn`f, who could read people as well as probably everyone else present, noticed the subtleties in every single movement. He knew with what half truths and lies he had now drawn this fighting force into his ranks. He had the mages in the city. But he did not yet have their commanders under control. Not yet. But he was working on that.

He led them all inside.

Into the coolness.

Into the splendour of his hall.

By now he had had a table built for himself, elaborate and true to scale, with Ashambrat on one side and the pyramid almost on the other. Roads, walls, the school, the valley, everything was reproduced upon it. It was impressive, and that was precisely the point.

Hokn`f now had those mages step forward who had been present at the battle during which the pyramid had risen. One after another, they gave their version of events. Of course it was no random memory. It was a finely coordinated account. A cowardly attack from nowhere. A desert people that had struck without provocation. Magic that had been worked illicitly, wildly and threateningly.

After the third account of the same event, Anadar raised his voice.

Master Usita had just finished his version.

“Master Usita,” Anadar said politely, “forgive the question. Why was such a large troop of mages out in the desert at that time? When I was still a student at the school, such excursions deep into the desert were not common. What was the occasion. Was there a reason why the Sondra might have felt provoked?”

Usita faltered.

It was only a short stammer, a snagging on the first answer, but it was enough. His gaze flew immediately to Hokn`f.

“Because, yes, because we were there...”

“For training purposes, Master Anadar,” Hokn`f interrupted him. “We had succeeded in developing a new spell, a very powerful one, and we wanted enough distance from everything to test its limits.”

He lied smoothly.

And cast Usita a look that promised consequences later.

Anadar turned back to the mage.

“So is it possible that your manoeuvre out there caused a misunderstanding.”

Usita looked again to Hokn`f, then back.

“Yes... ah... possible,” he admitted.

Anadar now turned to Hokn`f.

“How would you assess that.”

Hokn`f was seething inside.

Anadar was making a spectacle of him, he knew that. Yet he forced himself to remain calm. His voice stayed controlled as he answered.

“Certainly, this could have been misinterpreted. However, a deadly attack speaks a language of its own.”

“I am certain,” Anadar said calmly, “that there are two versions of the same story.”

At these words, his gaze briefly slid to Tzadier, who stood beside Hokn`f at the relief table, and again that faint smile moved across his face. It was no open grin. Only just enough to show that he saw more than he was being told.

Hokn`f reacted a moment too quickly.

“The Code forbids it,” he said, louder than he had intended.

The silence that began at once told him immediately that he had touched on something he would have done better to handle more cautiously.

He recovered himself.

“The Code forbids magical workings outside the school. And this is clearly documented here.”

It was Fontal who answered. Her voice had that calm which recalled an untouched surface of water.

“Nothing has been proven, Hokn`f. But you are implying it. So you wish to request an investigation of the circumstances, so that the Conclave may concern itself with the matter.”

This was not going according to his plan.

Not at all.

He had wanted agreement. Horror. Unity. Not this slow, cool shift in which his narrative suddenly became a motion, a suspicion, a possible subject for procedure.

When the assembly finally broke up, Hokn`f was beside himself.

The newly arrived mages asked to have the rest of the day to themselves. They had the arduous journey in their bones, and a ride through the desert was not something one could easily shrug off. The actual discussion was postponed until the following day. One by one, the mages from the other schools left the hall, until only Hokn`f and his closest circle remained.

As soon as the doors had closed, he turned to Tzadier.

“Why could you not prevent that,” he asked sharply. “I told you to influence their perception. They were tired, and we almost had them where we wanted them.”

Tzadier was still pale.

“Master,” he said. “You have no idea. He simply shut me out. In the middle of the discussion.”

Hokn`f looked at him.

“What do you mean, shut out.”

“He simply shut me out of his thoughts. And out of the others’. With ease. As though he were closing a door.”

Hokn`f thought only a single word.

Anadar.

If he was not careful, the fire mage would yet thwart all his plans.

First, however, he needed to take out his bad mood on something else.

“Find me this Okom,” he said. “I have not seen him for a long time. Find him at once.”

Then he thought further.

The problem with Anadar had to be solved. And there was still that brat in the dungeon. If the fire mage kept poking around here much longer, sooner or later he would come across her. Hokn`f sat there for a long time, sipping from his glass of brandy while the thought worked inside him. At last, an idea began to take shape. What else did one have helpers for.

He wrote a short message on a small slip of paper and fastened it to one of the pigeons intended for such things. At the very moment when he released it from his balcony, two mages entered the hall with Okom.

“Master, you had me called,” Okom said submissively.

Hokn`f gestured to the guards that they could leave, and indicated for Okom to step closer.

“Okom,” he said. “You are making yourself scarce. Is there something you would like to tell me. You do not seem happy with the situation here in Ashambrat.”

“Master? I am not sure what you mean.”

“You seem to be withdrawing, Okom. And yet you have such incredibly valuable and important talents, which you could use here beside me very much to your benefit and mine.”

Hokn`f looked the young mage in the eyes. Okom could not hold that gaze for long.

“Okom,” Hokn`f said more softly, almost kindly. “I would like to know you at my side here.”

He let the sentence take effect.

“For that, you need only do one thing for me.”

Okom raised his head again, hesitantly.

“That brat is still alive. That is a condition I cannot tolerate. Would you please end it for me, and then I will have a place for you here.”

The sentence hung in the room like something cold that could no longer be taken back.

And Hokn`f saw in the young mage’s face that this was precisely the moment in which it would be decided whether Okom finally belonged to him, or whether he would have to break him.

13

Okom’s day had come, and there was nothing within him that could have carried him through it.

He did not want to hurt anyone. He had never wanted to hurt anyone. Not truly. Not in the way the others apparently considered necessary. He did not want to kill, not to rise, not to gain recognition, not to finally be regarded as useful for once. After the conversation with Hokn`f, however, he knew that the decision no longer belonged to him. It had been taken from him. By the one man in Ashambrat who turned every weakness into a tool.

Since leaving the hall, he had known that they would not let him out of their sight. Perhaps someone was following him. Perhaps Tzadier had settled somewhere behind his back. Perhaps someone else had been set on him. Okom sensed no one. But that meant nothing. In a city like this, invisibility could be deliberate. And from Morgut he had heard nothing for days. No sign. No word. No thought that reached him.

He was alone.

Completely.

And now he was supposed to kill Gudi.

He knew he had no time. He also knew that if he did not do it today, someone else would take over. Perhaps more brutally. Perhaps more slowly. Perhaps with joy. In the end, it was that thought which set him in motion. Not obedience. Not courage. Pure disgust at what would otherwise happen.

So he went to the dungeon.

With a resolve made more of desperation than strength.

He descended. Every step echoed back at him too loudly. The corridor was long, damp and filled with that suffocating cold which in old masonry does not come from the air, but from too many things that had suffered down there. Already halfway along, Okom expected at any moment to feel a hand on his shoulder, to hear a voice behind him, to feel a knife in his back. None of it happened. That was precisely what made everything worse.

He stopped before the door of her dungeon.

Inside, Gudi lay on the stone.

She seemed smaller than usual. Not smaller in body, but in the room. As though the darkness around her had consumed something of her. Okom only looked at her for several minutes without moving, and in those minutes he understood that he had already made his decision.

He opened the door.

So carefully that even the hinge complained only softly.

Then he crept to her, knelt beside her and whispered:

“Psst. Wake up, Gudi.”

She flinched, startled out of shallow sleep, and needed a moment before she recognised him.

“What, Okom?”

“Be quiet,” he said. “It is time. We have to hurry.”

He had no keys for her chains. But he had prepared. His hands trembled as he set the magic. Even so, he managed to freeze the iron within the shortest time, until the links became brittle, and with two hurried blows they snapped.

Outside in the corridor, it was quiet.

Too quiet.

He listened. Nothing. He stretched out his mind. Nothing. No Tzadier. No guard. No half asleep thought clinging behind a door. Nothing. It was as though the night itself were holding its breath.

He went to the door and looked out.

No one.

Farther down the corridor too, no person, no thought, no remnant of presence.

He could hardly believe it.

They crept away. Quickly. Quietly. Gudi behind him, still weak, but awake enough to understand that every wrong movement could now be her end. They reached the exit of the dungeon. Still no one. Up the stairs. No sound. No encounter. No shout.

Okom expected to be discovered at any moment. Every step upward seemed like an invitation to disaster to finally strike. That nothing happened was almost worse than pursuit would have been. It had something unreal about it. Something that was already driving him to the edge of a far greater mistrust.

Then they were outside.

In the night.

Ashambrat lay under curfew, and that was their only protection. No one was allowed to be on the streets. No one was supposed to see them slipping through the shadows, along walls, through narrow alleys, beneath overhangs, through blind spots Morgut had described to him. Okom had arranged a hiding place with him, carefully chosen, not far away, reachable by paths one could take in secret.

He knew their disappearance would be noticed.

He also knew they would be searched for.

He only hoped, with a desperation that already hurt, that Morgut would think of something by then.

So he led Gudi through the night.

Unobserved, it seemed.

Still no thoughts.

Still no person.

Still only this silence, which by now clung to him like a second skin.

At last they reached the hiding place.

They went inside. Okom listened outside once more. Nothing. Again nothing. And only then did something slowly begin to loosen inside him. Not much. Just enough for hope to find a shape again.

They had overcome the first obstacle.

Escaped the dungeon alive.

Tomorrow, he told himself, tomorrow they would dare the second stage. Somehow out of the city. Before daybreak. Before their disappearance was discovered. In some direction, any direction, as long as it was away. Away from Ashambrat. Away from Hokn`f. Away from this cold madness that spread like mould over everything.

Gudi fell into his arms with gratitude as soon as she believed herself safe.

He had prepared food and water there. She seized it with a hunger that surpassed every remnant of dignity. Not because she no longer possessed any, but because hunger and fear had long since forced everything else out of her. Okom watched her eat and, for the first time in days, felt something that was almost peace.

It was not human eyes that had followed them.

No.

Hoknf was very well aware that Okom could sense the thoughts of others. But the undead do not think. And Hoknf had known that after their conversation, something would happen. He had long since prepared for that. He had his undead eyes everywhere.

Everywhere in the city.

In corners. In courtyards. In dark passageways. On roofs. Behind locked doors. Motionless where necessary. Moving where enough. The curfew ensured that no one encountered them and no one noticed their presence. Through the eyes of his awakened ones, Hokn`f himself looked down upon Ashambrat, calm, patient, almost indulgent, and so it had been easy for him to follow the two of them.

He found their hiding place very quickly.

Before midnight, he had surrounded it with enough undead to make escape impossible. Then he sent them in. One after another. Silent. Armed. Sword in dead hand, step by step, without haste, without anger, without hesitation. There was only one goal for them. To finish what Okom had failed to do.

It was over quickly.

Almost without resistance.

The silent undead butchered the two of them in the dark before surprise could turn into real resistance. A brief start. A soundless attempt to seize a weapon. A scream that did not travel far. Then it was over.

Hokn`f smiled coldly as he sent his undead army back underground.

He was getting better.

Better with every day at commanding them. At entrusting them with more complex tasks. At chaining sequences together. At letting them not only strike, but search, surround, wait and act at the right moment. It filled him with a deep, clean satisfaction, one that had nothing to do with crude cruelty and was worse precisely because of that.

What remained were two dead bodies.

Murdered in a night no one had noticed.

And what a waste it would have been, Hokn`f thought, if he did not integrate the two of them into his silent army as well.

14

“It is time we bring it to an end. In every ending lives a beginning.”

Marabar stood amid the enormous crater on black ash.

In earlier times, one had been able to enter this place through a tunnel in the mountain. The tunnel had long since collapsed, the path through the stone sealed. It was probably only a matter of time until even that could be opened again. Stone yielded. Mountains broke. Even landscapes remembered their old forms, if only one waited long enough or helped hard enough.

Marabar smiled.

Once, Sahretûn had stood here.

And soon it would rise again from this black dust.

He did not merely believe that. He had worked toward it. For a very long time. Far too long, some might have said. But what were years to someone like him. Years were only the material from which greater things were made, if one did not grow weak and did not give up.

He slowly looked around.

Behind him stood the undead twins, patient, motionless, perfectly alert. Between them sat Gnok on an iron chair, bound and gagged. Marabar had removed his blindfold so that he could see.

“You know this place, do you not,” he said softly. “You recognise it, Gnok.”

He expected no answer.

“To summon a city like Sahretûn is not as simple as it may appear. Back then, we had to depart in something of a hurry. As you surely remember.”

He turned halfway around and looked the old mage in the eyes.

There was horror there.

Good horror.

Not the raw, first fright of a person who sees something unexpected. But that deeper horror which only arises when memory and the present fit cleanly together and the mind understands what lies before it.

“Correct,” said Marabar. “We fled back then. The whole city. We moved Sahretûn into the Dungeon Dimension to escape you, my old enemy. You did thorough work. You almost destroyed us completely. But we had prepared for that eventuality.”

He began to pace back and forth before Gnok, slowly, with that perfectly controlled movement that was almost always more dangerous than any haste.

“At roughly the same time as you were planning our destruction, we were planning our salvation. Magic was fading from the world. It became more and more difficult to summon demons with power. In the end, our entire protection rested almost only on deterrence, on others knowing what we could still do in an emergency. And of course you sensed that eventually. Did you not. You and the other Ancients. You and Mother.”

He spat the name.

Not loudly.

Precisely because of that, it seemed stronger.

“You want to say something.”

Marabar stopped and leaned slightly forward, until his face was only barely an arm’s length from Gnok’s.

“She is no longer alive,” he said gently. “You took care of that. Thank you, my dear enemy.”

Then he laughed.

Loudly.

Freely.

With that cruelty which did not come from anger, but from enjoyment. He saw the despair in Gnok’s eyes and feasted on it.

“And that is exactly why I have not killed you yet. Because you are suffering. Suffering endlessly. From the murder you committed.”

He turned back toward the crater.

It was almost time.

It had taken a long while to prepare this field for the return. To clear the surface once more of rubble and uneven ground, to expose the basalt, to engrave the signs of passage deep into the earth so that stone could join itself to stone again. He had worked on it for a long time and personally overseen much of it, so that no mistake might creep into the work. Every single step had been correct. Every curve. Every line. Every cut. Again and again, he had thought of summoning a demon for this work, but he had decided against it. It had to be clean. It had to be right. Not quick.

And then the blood.

So much blood.

It had to be fresh.

Fresh and plentiful.

Again and again, he had brought people here, mostly slaves he had bought on Askand. People no one missed. People whose absence received no name in any city. He had made them work, had them smooth the black ground, carry rubble, remove ash and dig out grooves. And when they had fulfilled their purpose, he had killed them and taken their blood to soak and seal the signs. Then he had returned to Askand, bought new blood, new hands, new backs, new lives that meant nothing to him.

Thus the years passed.

But what were years to someone like him.

Now it was almost complete. The enormous summoning had been cut entirely into the basalt floor. The whole crater had become a single instrument. Marabar smiled quietly to himself. Again and again there had been the danger of being discovered. That was precisely what had made it so delightful. A game. A slow, patient game. And he was winning.

Suddenly one of the twins moved quickly.

Marabar spun around.

The undead had caught something. A dove. He crushed it in his fist as though it were an overripe fruit.

“Good boy,” said Marabar.

The two had been trained to protect him. And apparently they did so excellently. Marabar stepped closer and looked down at the crushed animal. One of those doves he had left with Hokn`f.

“What does that fool want now,” he muttered.

Hokn`f was useful. No more. No less. A serviceable chess piece in the game. He would unite the school beneath him, gather power, drive the city into a state of war, and when he was finished with that, he would be replaced. A pawn. A good pawn, but still only that.

Marabar bent down and took the dove’s foot. A message was tied to it. The animals were attuned to him. They would always bring the note to him, no matter to whom they had originally been given.

He unrolled the paper.

Read.

Then a cold smile lifted around his mouth.

“Interesting,” he said. “Very interesting.”

He looked over at Gnok.

“That opens entirely new possibilities.”

Then he stepped a little aside and began to paint signs on the ground while murmuring the appropriate words. Not hastily. Not loudly. Everything about him seemed calm, almost cheerful, as though he were preparing something exquisite and not another crime.

In the centre of the summoning, he drew his knife.

He intended to give the necessary blood for it.

But then his gaze fell on Gnok.

“Today I will not bleed,” he said merrily. “Today it will be you.”

He gave the twins a sign. They brought Gnok closer, tore his leg into the proper position, and Marabar cut a long, clean tear into the flesh with the knife. Blood flowed out at once, darker than on Askand, richer, fuller, from a mage and not merely from some nameless body. Marabar let it drip onto the signs and watched with satisfaction as the lines filled with it.

“That is more than enough,” he said, laughing.

Then he completed the summoning.

It did not take long.

The ground beneath the signs began to glow, then to burn, and from the earth rose a figure, a massive, alien horror. Five horns crowned the head, or whatever came closest to a head. Beneath it was a body with too many clawed hands. Above every claw sat an eye, and in every hand opened a mouth armed with teeth.

“Lord of Sahretûn, Marabar,” the mouths shrieked in hellish unison.

Marabar did not take a single step back.

“Muurgha,” he said. “Bring me a mage from Ashambrat. His name is Anadar.”

The demon wanted to move at once.

“Alive, Muurgha. Alive, bound and gagged.”

Muurgha rose to his full height and looked down at Marabar. There was resistance in his rearing. Disgust. Hatred. Perhaps even a remnant of demonic amusement that a summoner remained so small and yet commanded.

Marabar felt the resistance.

“Alive, Muurgha,” he said more sharply. “And not dying. Abduct him. Do not burn the city down. No one is to see you.”

The demon hissed and writhed. For one brief moment, everything in him braced itself against the service. Marabar held control. Cleanly. Hard. Without any visible sign of effort, even though the pressure through the binding was sharp enough that anyone weaker would have trembled from it.

At last, he forced Muurgha beneath his will.

These would be very amusing days.

Marabar turned once more to Gnok.

“The game,” he said, “is slowly nearing its end, my old enemy.”

Then he tied the blindfold back over his eyes.

The horror for today was enough.

15

Anadar was busy gathering all the information and holding it together.

He had noticed how someone had tried to influence him and the others. He had known the whole time that something here was wrong. That crude attempt at influence had only confirmed it beyond doubt. For that reason, he first allowed the man, Tzadier, to believe that it was working. The man was astonishingly clumsy about it. Far clumsier even than Fontal had been back then in Tandor. At the thought of it, Anadar smiled briefly, though more out of regret than any real pleasure. He had frightened the mage badly at the time. He had clearly sensed that when they had met again.

But Tzadier was of an entirely different kind.

Anadar allowed him to continue for as long as he could almost bear it no longer. The whole thing was so staged, so rehearsed, that it almost made him sick. So he had put an end to the game. He blocked Tzadier and, in the same moment, took the influence over the others out of his hands. It was easy for him to end the undertaking. Hokn`f was playing a dangerous game, and it was gradually time to truly approach that game and end it.

Anadar knew that Shara was meanwhile drawing closer to the other part of the matter. He trusted her completely in that. By the next Conclave at the latest, the masks would fall. Of that he was convinced. And until then, he was already laying out small threads of mistrust here.

When the Mind and Water mages finally excused themselves, pointing to their exhaustion, Anadar took this as an opportunity to withdraw as well. He descended the steps of the school and at first did not notice that Fontal was approaching him.

“A word, Master Anadar.”

He rose out of his thoughts and looked into the grey eyes of the dean of the School of the Mind.

“Mistress Fontal. Gladly. Incidentally, I have not yet had a chance to thank you. The documents arrived at the Fortress and were a great help to us.”

“I am pleased to hear that,” she said curtly. “I think we should walk a little apart.”

They went down the steps together and took a path through the city. Ashambrat was no longer as lively as it had once been, but the arrival of the mages from other schools had brought new commotion into the streets. Merchants stood together in groups, children were pulled out of the way more quickly than usual, people looked, then looked away again. The two walked beside one another in silence for a while, until Fontal began cautiously.

“It was you, was it not. The one who ended the influence.”

Anadar only nodded.

“I thought so,” she said. “But can you tell me why he is doing it.”

“Who.”

She cast him a brief sideways glance.

“Hokn`f. You know it. You feel it too, that something here is not as it seems.”

“I suspect it,” said Anadar.

“What do you know,” she asked without hesitation. “And why did you not ride in here with an entire troop.”

Anadar smiled faintly.

“That is a two part question, Fontal. What I know is that not everything is as it seems. I am missing several people. Gnok has vanished without a trace. So have my student Morgut and his sister. And quite a bit more is wrong. I cannot imagine that the Sondra would risk such a conflict lightly.”

“So we must hear their version,” said Fontal.

Anadar looked at her and this time smiled a little more openly.

“You are not here alone, are you. I sensed her presence. You know.”

“Whom.”

“Shara.”

Again he looked at her and smiled.

“You are good. Yes. She is here.”

“You are gathering information for Manador,” said Fontal. “You want to know what this is before you send the fire mages here. Correct.”

“That was not difficult to guess.”

“You are a spy.”

“I would not put it that way.”

Both laughed briefly.

Then Anadar grew serious again.

“I am not sure what we should open an investigation into. The Sondra, or Hokn`f after all.”

Fontal now looked serious again too.

“I do not know why, but he is having enormous quantities of weapons brought into the city.”

They continued strolling through the streets and spoke of several things, seemingly loosely, but in truth with great attention.

Suddenly Fontal said:

“You know that you gave me nightmares.”

Anadar turned slightly toward her.

“Which of it was real. Of the things you showed me in Tandor.”

“All of it, Fontal. All of it. And that is the terrible part. We live in times in which much is beginning to move.”

They were silent for a while.

Then she said:

“If you need help, Anadar, let me know. I do not know whether I am standing on the right side.”

This conversation followed him for a long time.

He knew that Fontal was a politician through and through. But to keep all sides open so brazenly, even he hardly dared attribute that to her completely. He went over the thought several times and finally decided to share it with Shara as soon as he could. She would probably be better able to tell him what Fontal truly intended.

Then he forced himself to concentrate on his actual task.

The weapons.

Over the last few days, he had observed where caravans were unloaded, how the crates and boxes were stored, moved on and redistributed. That was where he began. For this night, he prepared himself with various spells. Bird shape was inconvenient for nocturnal exploration underground. He considered whether a rat or a cat would bring him more success, and finally decided on the cat.

The transformation happened quickly.

After a few minutes, he had understood the essentials too, though at first he did not quite know what to do with the tail. It was in his way. Climbing vertically down and up also caused him problems at first, but he understood quickly. Soon he was darting through the nightly alleys, over walls, roofs and courtyards. Locked doors were hardly an obstacle in this shape. Either he found a gap large enough, or a window that did not close quite properly.

The streets were empty.

No one moved outside. The sun had long since gone down when he found the building in which the crates had been unloaded. One opening was enough, and he slipped inside.

He heard it.

And he smelled it.

Even before his eyes showed him what was happening there.

The weapons were being loaded.

Crates were being opened, swords and armour removed and carried into the cellar. By frames of bone. By skeletons. By undead.

At first, Anadar thought his perception as a cat was playing a trick on him. That the strange sensory world of his animal body was distorting the scene. But no. It was so. What was unfolding before him was real. A surreal, silent, monstrous scene.

He followed the undead into the cellar.

No one took notice of him.

Down there, three storeys beneath the earth, lay a hall. Weapons and armour were being placed at its entrance, and then one after another, other undead passed by the pile, took a helmet, a sword or axe, a breastplate, and continued farther down.

Anadar followed.

The next hall was larger. Much larger.

And there they stood.

Packed tightly together. In rows. One behind the other. Dead. Armed to the teeth.

An army.

Gathered underground.

Anadar stopped, and for a moment his blood froze. He had never seen anything like it. This was no improvised defence. This was preparation. This was intention. This was war before war had been openly named.

He had seen enough.

Quietly, carefully, quickly, he ran back upward in cat shape. No one paid attention to him. No one seemed to have seen him. He had almost reached the top when he perceived it at the last moment.

A claw shot toward him.

Only his cat reflexes saved him. In a single leap, he escaped the first movement.

His animal instincts tipped into panic. The thing standing before him could not possibly... But it was.

In the same instant, he transformed back and drew his sword as another claw of the demon came down upon him. He struck the hand off and forced himself to concentrate. A jet of flame shot from his left hand toward the creature, while one of the claws still struck him.

What then erupted was a battle unlike any Anadar had ever fought.

At first, he only tried to gain distance. Space. A breath of time. Enough to remember a banishment through his rising panic. But no matter what he tried, the demon withstood it and kept attacking. Blows. Claws. Horns. Constant pursuit, as though it had been bred precisely to allow no opponent any rest.

Soon the warehouse was burning.

The fire took hold of crates, beams and cloth. Above them, part of the roof exploded as the demon grew and struck at Anadar again with its claws. The first alarm bells began to ring in the city.

Anadar focused.

He tried a light spell. Again, several claws were severed, but that did not stop the demon either. It kept coming. It was too close. Too fast. Too real.

Then the creature attacked with its horns.

One of them pierced through Anadar’s stone skin.

Straight into his chest.

Anadar stared in disbelief at the horn protruding from him. His hand suddenly went weak. The sword slipped from his grasp. Everything became wide. Distant. Unreal.

The last thing he remembered was the fire flickering above the demon.

Then everything went black.

16

Morgut lost patience with the Sondra.

Perhaps not all at once. Not in a single burst of anger, not with a sudden outcry, but more slowly, hour by hour, conversation by conversation, in that quiet way in which patience does not snap, but grows thinner and thinner until one day it lies in the hand like nothing more than a thread. His sister sat in a dungeon. Her only protection was Okom, a mage with scruples, one who would rather duck away than openly take a stand. Morgut knew that even this was a great deal in a city like Ashambrat, and yet with every day it seemed less like rescue to him and more like delay.

He had now been stuck in the pyramid for several days.

Not in a cell. Not in chains. Not even under open coercion. But that changed nothing about the fact that he could not get away. Again and again, he was brought upward, as on every day, as if at some silent signal, and again and again everything revolved around the same questions. What help should look like. What exactly he expected. What he offered in return.

The Sondra were always friendly.

Always calm.

They never applied pressure. They never demanded anything in crude form. He was never threatened. Never even treated impolitely. That alone made it harder to direct anger at them. And yet he was running out of time. He felt it more sharply every morning. It was as though his sister were not merely sitting in a dungeon, but as though every hour were dripping away from her, and no one but him could hear it.

And again he was brought upward.

Again he sat opposite Zars, Dwon, Idan and Opla in the high, cool room near the summit of the pyramid, where light and air seemed strangely still in equal measure. Again it was about the same questions, only in a different order.

“You say,” Zars began, “that Ashambrat is no longer the same city.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you want us to help you intervene in precisely that city.”

“Yes, I want you to help me.”

Dwon slowly folded his hands.

“And what happens then,” he asked. “Let us assume we help you. We enter. We help you free the city. What follows. What will Hokn`f do in Ashambrat. His mages remain. His lie remains. When would you be satisfied.”

Morgut was silent.

“So we help you in this matter,” said Opla, “and leave a city to madness.”

“I am not here to practise philosophy,” Morgut snapped at her, faster and sharper than he had intended. “I am here because time is running out for me and I need help, quickly.”

It grew still.

Not offended. Not hostile. Rather the silence of beings who take note of something and work it into their judgement.

Zars was the first to speak again.

“We understand your pain.”

“No,” said Morgut. “You do not.”

He stood.

At once he could have cursed himself for the sentence, but it was too late. He had spoken it, and more than that, he had spoken it in exactly that tone in which exhaustion finally becomes defiance.

“If you bring me up here every day to ask the same questions, then you are not asking about help. You are only testing how long I remain calm.”

No one answered immediately.

Dwon looked over to Zars.

Idan exhaled audibly.

Zars remained seated and only lifted her gaze slightly.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we are testing both.”

That sentence hurt Morgut more than any threat.

Not because it was cruel. But because it was honest.

He stepped out to the edge of the uppermost level, where the air became drier and the desert lay beneath the pyramid like something infinite. For a moment he stood there, feeling his anger, his helplessness, his disgust at being stuck here while in Ashambrat everything was happening that should never have happened.

Then he made his decision.

He transformed.

Not slowly. Not beautifully. Almost angrily. Feathers. Bones. Lightness. A raven stood where a man had stood only a moment before, and with a single powerful beat of his wings he pushed himself from the edge of the pyramid and flew north.

No one stopped him.

The four only watched him go.

“He will want to do it alone,” said Dwon after a while.

“He is impatient,” said Idan.

“Perhaps rightly so,” replied Zars. “Only help from us would harm him more than it would help.”

Then a cautiously raised voice sounded behind them.

“Zars?”

They turned around. An elf had come up from below, young in the face, yet with that peculiar expression of the Sondra in which attentiveness sat deeper than mere courtesy.

“What is it, Fi,” Zars asked.

Fi turned her gaze from the bird that was already far out over the desert, heading north, and looked to her leader.

“Someone has entered the valley again, Zars. A woman.”

Morgut had lost patience.

He flew straight toward the city, and even from afar he saw that something must have burned. Smoke still hung in the air. One of the halls at the edge of the city jutted into the sky with a charred, half open roof. Weak smoke still rose from it. Morgut registered it, but it did not interest him. Not now. First he searched for an unobserved corner, transformed back, and immediately set out to find Okom.

First he searched where Okom usually moved during the day.

Nothing.

Then in the narrow alleys where he had tracked him down before.

Nothing.

He went to the quieter courtyards. To the inner paths between the school and the outbuildings. To the shadowed zones into which a man like Okom instinctively withdrew when he wanted to meet no one.

Nothing.

Morgut did not knock on doors. He peered through cracks. Listened. Again and again he stretched out his mind, feeling for faint threads of thought, for fear, for familiar uncertainty, for precisely that inner hesitation by which he could now have recognised Okom from any crowd of people.

There was nothing.

Nothing.

And now unease began to grow in him.

He walked faster.

Lost caution step by step.

He searched in the corridors near the mages’ quarters, then farther below, where one did not want to be seen so easily. He searched between walls, in dead angles, even in an abandoned courtyard where there was nothing but dust and an overturned jug. Every place where Okom could have waited, slept, hidden himself, was empty.

Then Morgut went into the dungeon.

No longer cautious.

No longer silent.

He forgot every reason, every calculation, every consideration of eyes, ears or consequences. He went directly to Gudi’s cell.

It was empty.

The stone. The remnants of chains. The darkness. Nothing else.

He looked into the neighbouring cells.

Opened doors.

Looked into other dungeons.

No one. Not Gudi. Not Okom. Not even blood. Only emptiness. As though what had happened had already been smoothed away again so that no gaze would catch on it any longer.

It drove him mad.

He left the dungeon almost running and took the path to the hiding place he had arranged with Okom. He had flown over it first and sensed no one there, which was why he had ignored it at first. But now, as he approached on foot, he knew that something was wrong. The door hung crooked. Not wide open, but in a way that smelled of betrayal. Wood was splintered. Part of the frame had been broken out.

Inside, there was blood on the floor.

Not much in some places. In others, so dark and dried that the stone had already drawn it into itself.

Morgut stood still for a single heartbeat.

Then he lost every restraint.

“That was an attack on one of our weapons stores, presumably led by the Sondra.”

They stood gathered around the great table in Hoknf’s hall. Hoknf was explaining the previous night’s fire in one of the halls as a raid that had been successfully repelled.

“Only the warehouse burned down,” he said in a calm voice. “And we found several charred bodies in the remains. Apart from that, little happened. The guards report, however, that they saw several figures fleeing over the walls. Southward.”

It was smoothly lied.

But Hokn`f cared little. What exactly had happened that night, he himself did not know down to the last detail. He only knew that no one had found the actual underground beneath the warehouse. Fortunately, the roof had collapsed and buried the access downward beneath it. His undead army below was intact and undiscovered. Nothing had happened to it. That alone counted. With a little skill, he could turn the fire to his advantage. Fire and a vanished fire mage. How fitting.

They were still discussing inconsequential things, details about security, patrols and the usual proposals, when suddenly one of the outer windows shattered.

Glass splinters sprayed into the hall.

A bird shot inside, large, black, fast, and transformed back into a human while still in flight. In the next instant, Morgut landed directly in front of Hokn`f.

He threw himself at him.

His hand closed around Hokn`f’s collar, and with a strength born of raw anger, he tore him upward.

“Where is she,” Morgut growled. “Where is my sister. What have you done with her.”

Hokn`f stared into the distorted grimace before him. For a moment, even he was surprised.

Then came the blow.

From behind.

Unusually hard.

Tzadier struck Morgut on the head with the grip of a dagger. The hit landed exactly right. Morgut’s fingers loosened. His eyes rolled back, and he collapsed unconscious to the floor.

The assembled mages stood around him.

From was the first to speak.

“That is Morgut. Anadar’s student.”

Her voice sounded frightened. Not feigned. Truly frightened.

“What has come over him.”

“I cannot say,” Hokn`f replied, furious, while smoothing his collar. No one had ever treated him like that. No one. “But presumably he is in league with Anadar. Where is the fire mage anyway.”

Fontal stood a little apart.

She observed the scene.

She was nowhere near as surprised as she pretended to be. In Morgut’s appearance and in Hokn`f’s reaction, she had sensed something she had to get to the bottom of. Not only anger. Not only chaos. There was a thread. One that led deeper down.

And she had long since begun to see it.

17

Slonda had long believed that his curiosity would one day drive him to ruin.

It was not a thought that frightened him. Rather one he had looked at so often over time that it had become almost familiar. He had seen too much, learned too much, crossed too many boundaries others knew only from writings. And yet it was not the dark, forbidden or dangerous art that drew him most persistently during those years. It was something else. Something foreign to him, and perhaps all the weightier for that.

The shifters.

Every time Slonda attended a Conclave, which he did from time to time, as had been agreed in the Time Circle, his gaze inevitably fell upon those mages who never appeared entirely in one fixed shape. Sometimes humans sat there whose eyes held a depth that recalled animals. Sometimes animal beings whose hands moved like human hands, sometimes humans with animal heads, as though they did not quite belong to the same form as the rest of the body. Sometimes figures who seemed human only at first glance and, on closer inspection, betrayed in every movement that something else lurked beneath skin and bearing.

They fascinated him.

More than he first wished to admit to himself.

While he deepened his studies of necromancy in Tandor, this thought kept pushing its way into his reflections. At first, he had set it aside. There was enough to do. Enough to learn. Enough to put in order. But with time, his relationship to the teachings of the dead changed. What had first appeared to him as a significant expansion of his knowledge lost its appeal. The dead were instructive, certainly. The dead were useful, not least in the hands of those who shaped order from the end. But they were silent. Predictable. They offered resistance only in the way matter offered resistance. Not like life.

And Slonda realised that, eventually, this bored him.

The living appealed to him more.

In the truest sense of the word.

It was transformation, movement, instinct, body, will, flight, hunt, fear, mating, anger, all those things the dead carried within them only as a coarse memory. The clearer this became to him, the clearer it also became that inwardly he had long since taken the next step.

So he made a decision.

The School of Transformation was not as closed as the summoners had been. Mysterious, yes. Foreign, without doubt. But not hermetic. Not entirely. And so Slonda finally set out northward, to Varakht.

Varakht was not a city.

It was not a fortress.

Not even a cluster of houses such as other schools built over the centuries from stone, wood and habit.

Varakht was a rock.

A vast, hollow rock, shaped by wind and tools, hollowed out, threaded through with entrances, shafts, clefts and broad chambers. Even from the outside, there was something about it like a being that had laid itself into the landscape and continued breathing there, even though no chest could be seen. There was not one main entrance, but many approaches, wide and narrow, high and low, round openings that recalled nests, and clefts through which only something slender or very small could have passed. Slonda stood for a long time before this place and looked up at it while the northern wind tugged at his robe.

Then he went inside.

Or rather, he was allowed inside.

Whether he was truly accepted or whether they merely tolerated him near their knowledge remained unclear to him for a long time. The answer was probably somewhere in between. The shifters did not greet him in the way other schools greeted a visitor. There was no solemn welcome, no dean explaining rules in a calm voice, no strict order that would have become visible at a glance. Instead, from the very first hour, Slonda had the feeling of having entered a current that had long been flowing and did not change in the slightest because of his presence.

No one there remained continuously in human form.

Some of them passed him as animals, and only when they looked at him did he understand that in that gaze there was not a mere creature, but a thinking mind. Others wore mixed forms, half human, half something else, often flowing into one another so seamlessly that Slonda could not have said where the boundary lay. An arm could run into a wing, a back into something that bore fur rather than cloth, a face could be different in the next moment, a jaw altered, the eyes set farther outward or deeper.

And the strangest thing was that no one there seemed to consider this form anything special.

It was not transformation as a trick.

It was life.

Slonda was admitted into this world as far as they chose to let him in. He learned anatomy at a depth that surprised even him. Not the dry order of bones, muscles and tendons that a necromancer needs in order to understand a body functionally. But living anatomy. The tension in a leap. The distribution of weight in a wolf, a stag, a bird of prey. The nature of the eye at night and by day. The relationship between hunting drive and caution. The shape of fear in the body. How animals saw. How they heard. How they grasped the world without breaking it into words.

For Slonda, it was a very instructive time.

And a disquieting one.

For he was never entirely sure with whom he was speaking. No one had a fixed shape, no fixed form, hardly even a fixed voice. Even when he believed he recognised one of them because height, gaze or bearing seemed similar, he could never be certain he was not mistaken. More than that, with time it seemed to him that there was not even an individual consciousness there in the way humans usually understood it. Not that the shifters were not individual beings. But they seemed connected to him, permeable, as though beneath their separate forms there lay something larger, a shared chamber of resonance in which thoughts, moods and perceptions touched one another.

He never fully understood how they were connected.

But he felt that they were.

Perhaps it was precisely this feeling that always kept him slightly uneasy. Slonda was accustomed to many things, but a collective that did not openly appear as a collective, that instead lived in countless individual beings and yet carried something common, remained foreign to him.

Their communication strengthened this impression even more.

They did not speak only with words. Or more precisely, words were only a small part of what happened among them. Much passed through sequences of tones, through repetitions, through intervals, through small melodic figures that Slonda never fully deciphered. It had something to do with music and with mathematics, of that he was certain. There were patterns, repetitions, reflections, answers that seemed to be conceived not in meaning, but in relation. Slonda found no true access to it. He could infer some things, as one builds first bridges into a foreign language with patience, but he never truly penetrated it.

Perhaps they never let him fully in.

That was possible.

And perhaps that was precisely their form of caution.

Yet despite everything, he managed to learn what mattered. Not everything. Not to the depth at which the shifters themselves understood their art. But enough. Enough to assume several animal shapes. Enough to understand the body as something more mobile than most schools ever did. Enough to notice how much thought lay in flesh, and how much magic in the willingness to move out beyond oneself.

It was enough for him.

At least for a while.

Then something else became clear to him.

He was avoiding things.

Not a single duty, not a person, not a concrete decision. But the return. His own time. What awaited him there. He knew it. Things would become serious. Dangerous. Heavier than they already were. And as much as he liked to see himself as someone who approached necessities soberly, he was not free of a love for detours when the destination was unpleasant.

So in the end, there was nothing for him but to seek a passage.

One stable enough.

Safe enough.

And he found one.

Not easily. Not without effort. But finally he found it and walked it, leaving behind a time he had barely liked at first and which, at some point, had grown dear to him after all.

When he returned to his own line, the leap was smaller in time than he had expected. Only a few weeks lay between his departure and his return. Spatially too, he was not far from Tandor. So the world had not moved far away from him, and yet in that first moment, when he once more had solid ground beneath his feet, it felt different.

Denser.

Tense.

As though somewhere a tone had been struck that not everyone could hear, but which was already changing the air.

And so it came to pass that one morning Slonda walked into Tandor, precisely in the hour when Mother and Isidre were fighting for the life of the Kaula.

The city of the earth mages lay quiet in the morning sun, and yet Slonda sensed even as he drew near that something within it had fallen out of order. It was not turmoil. Not open panic. Rather that shifted concentration that moves through a school when many know something is wrong without it needing to be spoken aloud. People walked faster. Conversations ended sooner. Glances more often slid toward doors behind which something lay hidden.

Slonda entered the inner areas without much difficulty. He knew Tandor too well to move there like a stranger. Yet the closer he came to the wing where Isidre conducted her studies, the more clearly he perceived the tense attention.

And then he saw them, the Kaula in Isidre’s rooms as he entered. For a moment, Slonda simply stood still. The water beings had become story, and yet now they were here. One severely wounded. The others silent, watchful, with that kind of presence that immediately made him feel they were neither humans nor mere foreign guests, but bearers of a much older world. Then he stepped inside.

There was Mother, bending over something that lay in the bed, and Isidre worked beside her, concentrated, pale with exhaustion and will. Xiodrie stood somewhat apart and looked, as always, as though she belonged both right in the middle of it and not in this place at all.

The wounded Kaula lay on a couch prepared especially for him.

And Slonda saw the wound.

He was accustomed to many things.

He had seen the dead, the decaying, the magically destroyed, bodies broken open under spell and counterstrike, summoning failures, necromancy, things other eyes could never have endured. Yet what lay before him was of another kind. The wound did not simply look inflamed, poisoned or corrupted. It seemed as though something was working inside it. Not life. Not in the true sense. But movement. A black, unnatural continuation of the damage, as though the blow had not only struck flesh and tissue, but had left behind a kind of continuing rot that still wanted to think itself onward.

“Slonda,” Mother said, without sounding surprised, as though she had long known that he would enter at exactly this moment. “How lovely that you finally show yourself again.”

“Mother,” he replied and inclined his head. “Isidre.”

Isidre looked up only briefly.

“If you want to help, then not with courtesies.”

He did not let that disturb him and stepped closer.

“What is that.”

“A wound,” Isidre said dryly, “that cannot be grasped.”

Mother looked at him.

“The sword into which Anadar forced the demon caused it.”

That was enough.

Slonda understood at once why the room felt as it did.

He bent over the Kaula and examined the place without touching it at first. Even merely looking at it carried a resistance. The wound seemed to be there and at the same time to withhold part of its reality from access, like something not quite bound to this plane.

“I have never seen anything like this,” he murmured.

“Neither have we,” said Isidre. “And that does not comfort me in the slightest.”

Xiodrie, who had remained silent until now, stepped a little closer.

“It looks like a form of demon rot.”

Slonda raised his head.

Mother and Isidre had already reacted to that sentence, he saw it at once. Apparently it was not new. Yet now that he himself was present, it weighed more heavily.

“You know this,” he asked.

“Not from seeing it myself,” said Xiodrie. “But from stories. Old curses. There were witches who could attach something to a person that kept eating onward, even when the wound itself should already have grown still. What I know of it looked like this. And it was always fatal.”

The room became very still.

Slonda looked at the injury again.

Demon rot.

The word fit.

And he did not like that it did.

“If it is demonic in nature,” he said slowly, “then mere healing arts will not be enough. You are not treating only the destruction. You must loosen something that has written itself into the damage itself.”

Isidre briefly closed her eyes.

“I know that myself.”

“I did not doubt it.”

She cast him a look that in another hour would have been sharper, but she was too tired for a real argument.

Mother took half a step back and studied Slonda in that way he had known from her since he had been younger, when more clearly than anyone else she had given him the feeling that she saw more than she said.

“You have returned at precisely the right time,” she said.

“I hope so.”

“So do I.”

Slonda stretched out his hand, held it above the wound, and very carefully let his mind glide near it. Not into it. Not yet. First only to test form and resistance. At once he felt something set itself against him. No simple remnant of a spell. No mere echo. Something small, cold and tough that did not want to let go. In structure, it reminded him more of a binding than of an ordinary curse.

He drew his hand back.

“This will be unpleasant,” he said softly.

“For whom,” asked Xiodrie.

“For everyone, if we do not do it correctly.”

Mother smiled very faintly.

“That at least sounds like a task you might enjoy.”

Slonda looked at the Kaula, at the black edges of the wound, at the strange water beings in the room, at Mother, barely recovered and yet already once more at the centre of things, and understood that his detours were over.

He was back.

And the time he had tried to escape was already waiting for him.

End part 2