suspicion. Kellen ordered a fish-roll, and after a careful look around at the clientele, a round of beer for the house.
His generosity was greeted with an upwelling of warmth, and Kellen took a seat across from a fellow who looked as if he was a bit more intelligent and observant than the rest, and might have a tale or two to tell.
'Workingmen got to stick together, eh?' he said as he sat down and clinked mugs with the weather-beaten sailor. 'Came down here to get a bit of sun and fresh air on my day off, and what do you think happens?'
The sailor spat off to the side. 'Guard gives you trouble?' he asked, though they both knew it wasn't a question.
Kellen grimaced. 'Too true, mate. Dunno what they thought I was gonna get up to—I told 'em I had a fancy for fried fish, and was there a law against that now?'
The sailor guffawed. 'Good answer. What's your trade?'
'Scribe-in-training. Got a letter you need written? Don't mind doing a favor for a tale or two,' Kellen said quickly, knowing he would never pass for an ordinary laborer. But a scribe was a workingman, no higher in rank than the laborers he served, since no one of any means at all needed them. 'I'd leave if I could—but my mother—' He shrugged helplessly. 'If I can't leave, I'd as lief hear a tale.'
'Aye, that's a fair trade,' the sailor said cheerfully, and called for pen and paper, which the bartender brought, and which the sailor paid for himself. He dictated his letter, a common enough epistle. Kellen read it back, and the sailor took possession of it with great satisfaction. 'I'll hand it off to someone on the Sea Sprite,' the man said, looking pleased. 'They're on the inbound leg, and my Evike will be right glad to get a word of me so soon. Now, young friend, you were after a tale. Well, I mind me of something that happened two voyages back, on a dark night with no moon, when we were near dead in the water…'
Kellen settled back to listen with an intensity that his tutor Anigrel would have been surprised to see.
THE CHAMBER IN which the High Council of Armethalieh met was a vast space devoted by day to meetings of the Council. By night, it was used as a secure chamber for the workings of the High Magick that guaranteed the smooth functioning of the City of a Thousand Bells. The enormous circular chamber occupied most of the center wing of the Council House, and was easily the largest single enclosed space in the entire City. Save for a star- shaped ring of windows at the apex of its vast domed golden ceiling, it was windowless, its enormous interior space lit by the sourceless blue-white glow of shadowless, unchanging Magelight. The soft directionless light made day and night as one: the only hint of time's passage was the movement of the sunlight or moonlight that spilled through the windows at the apex of the dome, and the muffled chiming of the City bells.
Few of Armethalieh's ordinary citizens ever saw this place, for a hearing before the assembled High Council was reserved for those occasions when every other means of resolving a situation in accordance with the City's ancient Laws had been exhausted—for that, and for the few necessary dealings of Armethalieh with foreigners. And for these reasons, and others not known to most of the inhabitants of the Golden City, the chamber's designers, in the long-ago time of the City's first founding, had taken great care to make the High Council chamber as stark and intimidating as possible.
The walls of the Council chamber were of featureless white marble, polished so perfectly that their smooth curve gleamed like a dull mirror, broken only by two golden doors set into their surface at opposite sides of the circular chamber. Each door was wrought with the symbol of the Eternal Light in gleaming high relief, so that the planes and angles of their exquisite surfaces glittered, even in this diffuse light, as if they were aflame. The floor was inlaid in a complex pattern of polished black and white marble—to the uninitiated eye, no more than a slightly disorienting decorative pattern, but in fact a series of keys that allowed Adepts to keep their proper places during the nighttime Workings. It was a singularly cold room, designed to chill the spirit and numb the ability to think. It took some time for even a Mage to become accustomed to these surroundings and work unaffected by them.
At one end of the windowless room, its curve echoing that of the curving wall behind it, there stood a judicial bench of black marble twice the height of a tall man, behind which the thirteen members of the High Council sat to make their solemn deliberations. The Arch-Mage of Armethalieh, chief of the High Council, Lycaelon Tavadon, sat at the center of them, the back of his unadorned thronelike chair of black marble rising high above the other seats, a stark silhouette against the white wall behind him. Six unbreathing stone golems, seven-foot statues given life and motion by the High Magick, stood guard in the room to protect the Mages from their supplicants, their mirror- polished grey granite skin reflecting the softer stone of their surroundings. The elaborate and distinctive embroidery on the thirteen Mages' formal grey robes of Judgment—from which those who were versed in such things could discern not only rank and family, but much of that Mage's personal history and record of achievement and awards as well—was the only spot of color in the entire room—and of course, since Lycaelon's 'colors' were black and white, he looked of a piece with the room, and scarcely more human than the golems.
Yesterday the Selken trading fleet had docked, and as was traditional, Undermages from the Customs House had gone aboard to inspect the cargoes, releasing those items that had been approved on previous voyages to the traders' warehouses for inspection and sale. But the traders were always bringing new wares to offer to the City of a Thousand Bells, and so today, as had been set down in custom from time immemorial, each trading captain must bring samples of his new merchandise to the Council House to see if it might also be approved for sale in Armethalieh.
As the merchant-captains stood in an apprehensive gaggle several yards away in the center of the room, Lycaelon and his fellows conferred over the sample wares. No matter how many times some of them might have stood there, Lycaelon was pleased to see the foreigners never lost their proper awe of the High Mages of Armethalieh. A Spell of Judgment, carefully cast over the chamber before the captains had been allowed to enter, allowed each member of the council to share the feelings at the surface of the others' minds, projecting them so that each member of the Council could be aware of the opinion of all the others, whether favorable or
