Nepanthe said nothing. She watched Varthlokkur spy here, send Radeachar there, then enter the blazing construct of the Winterstorm. His manipulation of bril iant floating symbols shaped changes far away. Snow might melt early and raise waters enough so an army patrol would not discover the fugitive from Lioantung. An icy gust might assail the camp of some of the Itaskians trying to take over in Kavelin, starting fires. An agent of Queen Inger might be about to stumble onto the loot from Kavelin’s treasury when something stirring in a sudden darkness so terrified him that he would never go near that pond again. An avalanche might block the route of an il -advised winter raid by Colonel Abaca’s Marena Dimura partisans. A bridge col apse beyond the northern frontier might abort an equal y il -
advised winter incursion from Volstokin.
He watched Hammad al Nakir less determinedly. There the daughter of the Disciple, Yasmid, pursued a sporadic, fratricidal civil war against her son Megelin while her father sank ever deeper into a permanent opium dream. There was a special need to watch the son. Megelin’s key al y was the dark sorcerer Magden Norath, who might be as powerful as the Empire Destroyer himself. No one knew what moved Norath. He created monsters that were almost impossible to destroy, for no more obvious reason than a lust for destruction.
Norath was weak now, though. He had become the principal target of El Murid’s suicide kil er cult, the Harish.
He thwarted every attack but only after it got close enough to hurt him. Damage was accumulating.
Varthlokkur turned to something of no interest. Nepanthe moved on to the shrunken stasis globe where once the Princes Thaumaturge of the Dread Empire had been trapped, then had murdered one another. Why had Varthlokkur kept that in this diminished form? Why had he not ground the princes to dust, then burnt the dust? Would that be impossible? Could be. It had taken the Star Rider’s power to capture them.
She had been there, but that was al she could remember clearly— other than that it had been a terrible night. She feared that she had done something she dared not remember.
She shied away. Those days were gone. Horrible times, they had been fol owed by more horrible times. It had taken many ugly seasons to bring her here, to a remote place and a life with a man she respected deeply but did not love, nursing her insane son by her first husband and raising an eerie daughter by the second.
Nepanthe drifted round the Winterstorm, as ever wonderstruck. Once Varthlokkur had fil ed her hair with those glowing symbols… Another memory she did not want to relive.
She turned to her husband. They had been at odds for months because he had been so determined to shield her from the pain of learning that her son Ethrian had become a monster. He had been that insecure.
Enough! She teetered at the brink of a slide into a hel that existed only in the bleak realms of What If? and Might Have Been. This was now. Now was here. They two had to act as one. Innumerable divinations were iron about that.
Varthlokkur left the Winterstorm. He was exhausted. He took a seat. Nepanthe moved in close, to support him with the warmth of her presence.
In a whisper, he said, “Every day I drive myself to the verge of col apse, trying to hold back the night. But I don’t do any good.”
“Let it go. Turn away. Focus on us and the children. The fire wil burn itself out without you.”
“Am I resisting the tide of destiny? Are my efforts pointless?”
“It may take everything you have just to raise Ethrian and Smyrena to be marginal y sane adults.”
Varthlokkur nodded. The children were in his thoughts always. Al four, not just Nepanthe’s babes. “I wish. But bad things happened. Some were my fault. I can’t help trying to make that right.”
Nepanthe did not argue. There was no changing his mind, be his choices good, evil, or just stubbornly unreasonable.
And it was true that he had unleashed some of the darkness stalking the world today.
She asked, “What’s the situation now?”
“They’ve moved Bragi to Throyes. He’l never break out, now, and even I couldn’t get him away from this place.”
“And Haroun?”
“One day at a time. Stil headed home. Stil sheltered by the fact that nobody knows he’s alive.”
“And you’re helping.”
“Not so he’l notice. He’s hard. He’s convinced that he can go anywhere any time because he’s a master shaghun now.”
Today’s Haroun resembled Varthlokkur at a similar age.
Prolonged observation left the wizard feeling an eerie deja vu.
Haroun had no boundaries. He could kil or be cruel without thought, remorse, or regret. He did terrible things to people who got in his way and lost not a minute of sleep. He would do the same on behalf of his friends. Or to his friends if they became silhouetted against his destination.
Varthlokkur did not sleep much anymore, not because of demands on his time. There were long stretches when his body felt no need. But there were other times, for a week or two, when he would sleep twelve hours a day. At present he needed only the occasional nap.
Of late, in his manic stretches, he had begun using Radeachar to probe the mysteries surrounding its creation.
The key points were known. In a mad, complex scheme involving the Captal of Savernake, Yo Hsi, the Demon Prince of the Dread Empire, had impregnated the barely old enough Queen Fiana with seed special y prepared in Shinsan. Though the truth had surfaced only recently, Old Meddler had had a hand in it, too. The scheme had col apsed. Fiana bore a daughter instead of the devil the conspirators wanted. So they switched that daughter for their own child, at the time unaware of the girl’s sex.
Years later, fol owing the death of her husband, the King, Fiana enjoyed a liaison with Bragi Ragnarson. She became pregnant. That had to be concealed for political reasons.
Fiana died in childbed, birthing the thing the conspirators had planted in her womb years before. Some twist in time had transposed her pregnancies. Varthlokkur suspected the Star Rider.
The horror within Fiana was too large for her birth canal.
Her bel y had been opened. The monster passed into Varthlokkur’s control and became his terrible familiar, Radeachar.
Al that was known to a few survivors of al the war and wickedness since, including, possibly, the dark wight creeping westward through the Dread Empire, sometimes in stages of only yards a day.
Recently, while trying to winkle out anything more about how the Unborn had come to be, Varthlokkur had stumbled across an ugly truth. There had been a day when the King Without a Throne thought it necessary to dispose of a prince named Gaia-Lange, and then a little princess, convinced as he had been that they were instruments of the Dread Empire.
How Old Meddler must have laughed.
Haroun had made two cruel choices and both had been bad. To this day no one suspected. Especial y not Bragi Ragnarson.
Since then the King Without a Throne had done the unexpected several times by hurling his Royalists at the enemies of Kavelin’s King Bragi. No one could fathom why.
Some thought that was because several young Mercenary Guildsmen—Ragnarson, his brother, and friends— had saved Haroun repeatedly when he was a boy.
Haroun could not confess the greatest misjudgment of his life. He could not confess a sin that never stirred a feather of suspicion.
Varthlokkur had stumbled onto the truth and had been appal ed. He, who could justify his own foulest deeds, could not understand what had moved Haroun to murder those children.
The guilt that shaped what Haroun had done since was no mystery. Varthlokkur knew guilt wel . Guilt was a lifelong, intimate companion.
...
The fugitive’s life was narrow and smal . He was unique in his ability to focus on himself and his surroundings. He always saw the needful thing where survival was concerned. He had long-term goals, medium- term goals, and goals that did not go beyond the moment. Every moment negotiated led to another, then another. Enough conquered moments became a successful y completed short-term goal.
