Asandir sighed. A sadness settled over him as oppressive as the mists on the mountains. ‘We tried,’ he said bleakly. ‘Ciladis of the Fellowship took on that quest, for he treasured the old races most of all.’ A minute stretched painfully through silence. ‘He never returned.’
As if the night were suddenly too dark, or the cold off the peaks too penetrating, Asandir abandoned the subject. He strode back toward the lights of the outpost, leaving Arithon to the company of the horses and a moil of frustrated thoughts.
Set on a knoll above the scrub-covered dunes that bordered the Bittern Desert, the spire of Althain Tower endured winds that never eased. Time and seasons might change, but in snowfall or sultry summer, drafts moaned through the shutters on the highest floor, riffling the corners of parchments caught between musty stacks of books. Unwashed tea mugs nested between the piles like abandoned eggshells in straw; walled round by clutter, surrounded by unstoppered ink wells and a row of meticulously sharpened quills, Sethvir of the Fellowship minded his cataloguing. While his awareness ranged far and wide beyond his tower eyrie, tracking events and portents that encompassed the grand movements of armies to the change of polliwogs into frogs, he penned neat script onto parchment and recalled candles only as an afterthought. Darkness came and went in its daily rhythms, unmarked by sleep or lighted sconces.
And yet amid the wail of a gust off the fells, when something flurried at the casement as slight as the scuffle of a mouse, Sethvir lifted his head. His poet’s eyes lost their vagueness as he laid aside his quill pen.
‘Traithe?’ he said, on his feet in an instant. A six-day accumulation of dust billowed up from his robe as he shoved between chairs heaped with scrolls and opened the shutters on a predawn sky coiled with mist.
Rewarded the next moment by a downward rush of dark wings, the sorcerer’s pensive frown melted. ‘Welcome back, little brother,’ he greeted the raven that alighted on the knotworked border of his cuff. The bird croaked. It cocked a pert head and blinked an eye intent with intelligence.
Sethvir shut the casement, a detail he intermittently neglected. ‘Did you bring your master, little one?’
The raven hopped to his shoulder and reproachfully preened its left primaries. When Sethvir responded by waiting, it shifted its feet and spoke again, sharply impatient. The sorcerer chuckled. ‘All right, I’m on my way.’
Forgetful that wet ink now hardened on his favourite nib, the Warden of Althain bore the bird from the copy chamber and down the bare spiral stairwell that accessed the tower’s nine levels. Shadows of past ages lingered thickly here, but no place more than at ground level, where the mist-filtered gleam of first light etched the marble- carved statues of centaurs, sunchildren and unicorns. Jewelled eyes and gilt trappings flashed at Sethvir’s passage, wakened to glittering reflections as he brightened the torches by the tower’s sole entry. At the foot of a shallow flight of steps, Sethvir caught a ring from a recessed socket and slid aside gold-chased panels of red cedar. The dusty smells of books and old tapestries gave way before the sharper tang of oiled steel, while new flamelight threw grim highlights over a clockwork array of counterweights and chain. The raven unfurled its wings for balance as the sorcerer set hands to the windlass. He cranked back the bars on two massive, metal-bound gates, which opened on a vaulted sally port cut through the base of the tower.
Here the drafts sang in dissonance through arrowloops and murder holes. Sethvir touched ink-stained knuckles to a secondary barrier of carved oak; the arcane bindings he released next collapsed in a blue-white sheet of clean fire, letting in the moist scents of grasses and mist and damp earth.
Sethvir paused, fleetingly touched by regret. That Althain Tower had ever needed its antiquated, second-age defenceworks was sorrowful enough; but that he should require wards, and that he should need to
The guard-spells that Sethvir had dissolved on a thought, that he could have
The raven flapped irritably.
‘All right, little brother.’ Harried back to duty, Sethvir unbarred the wooden doors.
Outside, beyond the battered barrier of a final portcullis, stood a sorcerer, his deeply-lined face and hooked nose shadowed under a wide-brimmed hat. A patterned silver band and straight-cut silver-white hair were the only bright aspects about him; the rest of his clothing including scuffed boots was fashioned of unadorned black. The raven did not wait for Sethvir, but bounded through the grille to light on its master’s shoulder.
‘Welcome,’ murmured the Warden of Althain, the usual misty distance restored to his blue-green gaze. ‘I trust your passage was swift?’
Traithe of the Fellowship shrugged, his iron-clad stoicism shaded ineffably toward disgust. ‘I was only in Castle Point.’
The clang of the outer winch re-echoed through the arch while the portcullis ground ponderously upward. Traithe shouted over the din. ‘I searched for six days before I found a captain still willing to sail the coastline!’
The portcullis stopped. Sethvir ejected a rude word that rang isolate across fallen silence. Then he said, ‘That frustration won’t last, my friend. Banish Desh-thiere, and you can restore the lost arts of navigation.’
‘But that would take—’ Traithe’s sombre mien transformed before a smile of wounding hope. ‘The Prophecy of West Gate? Is this why you called me? A prince has returned from Dascen Elur?’
‘Princes,’ Sethvir said succinctly. ‘S’Ilessid and s’Ffalenn, on their way here with Asandir.’
Traithe chuckled outright. ‘Even better! Ath, I was going to grumble about sore feet, and here, you’ll have me dancing on them instead.’ He reached down, lifted the saddle and bridle heaped by his boots as though he no longer felt the miles he had ridden through the night.
Determinedly bent to mind the winch, Sethvir took no brightness from his tidings. That Traithe, who had sacrificed more than any to avert the desecration of Desh-thiere, who was most vulnerable to harm if town factions should discover his identity, who through these late and troubled years was most resilient over his failures – that of the Seven, Traithe must wait weeks and travel miles to receive news that Asandir, Kharadmon and Luhaine had all known on the wings of the moment itself was a grievous injustice.
Through the passage, Sethvir re-set gates and defence-wards with the motions of long habit, while Traithe regarded the statues commemorating old-race heroes of a past that now seemed febrile as a dream, though the
