nickered after her.
The bard looked askance at the much-too-still shadow that was Arithon. ‘You’re almost as secretive as the sorcerer.’
Which was the nature of a spirit trained to power, not to volunteer the unnecessary; but Arithon would not say so. ‘Why did you come out?’
Felirin returned a dry chuckle. ‘Don’t change the subject. You can’t hide your angst behind questions.’
Arithon said nothing for an interval. Then with clear and deliberate sting he said, ‘Why not? You know the ballads. Show me a hero and I’ll show you a man enslaved by his competence.’
The bard took a long, slow breath. A difficult man to annoy, he had neatly and nearly been goaded to forget that Arithon’s mettlesome nature defended a frustrated talent. ‘Listen to me,’ Felirin said quickly. An honest desperation in his entreaty made Arithon ease off and give him space. ‘Promise me something for my foolishness. There’s a singer, a Masterbard, named Halliron. If you meet him, I beg you to play for him. Should he offer you an apprenticeship, I ask for your oath you’ll accept.’
Silence; the footfalls as curious horses advanced from the far side of the corral. Then a chilly gust of air rattled through the trees. Arithon pushed off from the fenceboards and cursed in an unfamiliar language through his teeth. ‘Like sharks, you all want a part of me.’ His voice shook; not with fury, but with longing.
Felirin smiled, his relief mixed with guilt-tinged triumph. ‘Your oath,’ he pressured gently. ‘Let me hear it.’
‘Damn you,’ said Arithon. In a shattering change of mood, he was laughing. ‘You have it. But what’s my word against the grandiloquent predictions of a maudlin and drunken prophet?’
‘Maybe everything,’ Felirin finished gently. ‘You’re too young to live without dreams.’
‘I wasn’t aware that I didn’t.’ Lightly firm in his irony, Arithon added, ‘Right now, I wish to go to bed.’ He walked away, left the bard to thwarted curiosity and the crowding attentions of the horses.
On the downs of Pasyvier, by the flames of a drifter’s fire, a seer speaks sharply to a grande dame returned from the autumn horse fair. ‘Say again, you saw a sorcerer? And with him a blond-haired stranger who spoke the speech of the true-born? I tell you, if you did, there will be war…
In the hall of judgement in West End, seated on his chair of carved oak and carnelian, a town mayor listens, sweating, to a similar description from the half-wit who played fiddle in the square…
Under mist in the Peaks of Tornir, a wild, screeling wail calls Khadrim in retreat back to spell-warded sanctuary; and the harmonics ring of death by spell-cursed steel not seen for a thousand years…
VI. ERDANE
The walls of Erdane had been raised at the crossroads two ages before the uprising which threw down the high kings had bloodied its maze of narrow streets. Now, five centuries later, the city wore change like a tattered, overdressed prostitute. Guild flags and a mayor’s blazon fluttered over the Grand West Gate, built by Paravian hands of seamless, rose-veined quartz. The stone at street level was left pitted and scarred by siege-weapons, and greyed by the passage of uncounted generations of inhabitants. Had the sentries in the mayor’s guard been as vigilant as their counterparts in times past, they would have challenged the woman in the shepherd’s cloak who passed the gatehouse, hooded. Boots of sewn sealhide showed beneath her ankle-length skirts, but their soles were not made for walking. Her hands were calloused from the bridle-rein, and her eyes a clear and disturbing grey.
But the captain of the watch barely glanced up from his dice game and the teenaged soldier who lounged on his javelin stayed absorbed by a whore, who paraded her bedizened attractions for the eyes of a loud-voiced drover.
Elaira, Koriani enchantress and message-bearer for the Prime, entered Erdane unremarked between a wagon bearing three sows and the rumbling wheels of an aleseller’s dray. She was the first of her kind to pass the city gates for close to four hundred years and the only one to try without any sanction from her seniors. Had she been recognized for what she was, she would have been stripped and publicly burned after barely a pretence of a trial.
Other women had suffered that sentence inside the past half-decade. If the mayor of Erdane suspected the charges against those accused were false, his conscience never bothered his sleep. What troubled his guildmasters and council to cold sweats was the fear that powers from the past might arise out of legend and claim vengeance. For unlike the commoners and the craftsmen, the Lord Elect of Erdane had access to archives that detailed a history of conspiracy and murder. To him, to his council and his general of armies, the sun was no myth, but a harbinger of sorcery and certain doom.
Elaira was cognizant of the risks. She kept her knotworked hood pulled low over her forehead and took care not to pass between the flirtatious whore and her sources of male attention. When the ale dray pulled up precipitously to avoid a running urchin, the enchantress ducked out of the main thoroughfare. She hastened down streets of marble-fronted guild-halls, threaded across the artisans’ district, then turned through a moss-dark arch.
The alley beyond was barely wider than a footpath. Fallen slates and rat-chewed ends of bone clogged the gutters. Seepage dripped in mournful counterpoint to the moss-crusted planks of half-rotted, open-air stairways; and from spell-charmed strips of tin nailed up to ward off iyats. Unlike many such talismans, these held true power to guard. Elaira could sense the faint resonance of their protections as she wound her way past ill-smelling puddles and locked shutters.
This slum by the edicts of town law should never have managed to survive: it had no wineshops or pot-traders on the lower levels. Dirty children did not play in the gutters, and drunks did not snore off binges; whores sought no customers here, nor did headhunters with old campaign scars loiter between assignments to boast of kills. This was a street whose inhabitants Erdane’s mayor sorely wished to eradicate; except that in the teeming maze of the wall district, its location was most difficult to know. Wayfarers came seeking the archway and found themselves inexplicably side-tracked. They might blink and miss the entry, or be distracted by a noise or a thought; and before they had grasped they had missed something, they would have passed on by.
For anyone untrained in spellcraft to pause here, even for a second, was to become lost in a mage-worked tangle of deception.
Elaira found the stairwell with carved gryphons on the newels. This was the house; here. She had all but sold her jewel for directions. For the Koriani matron who had received the scrolls from the Prime had been garrulous enough to repeat rumour. If she was right, the mayor’s most persistent nightmare was already half-way realized: a Fellowship sorcerer and two old-blood princes were temporarily in residence within Erdane.
