stood fallow opposite his plank bed. Immense ceiling timbers ran overhead, black with pitch, the spaces between insulated with layers of animal pelts-wolf, deer, even hare and marten.
He smiled a sad upside-down smile. Some small memory winced at the barbarity of the place, for he had spent a good portion of his life travelling the fleshpots of the South. But it had been home for far too long to seem anything other than safe. For nearly twenty years he had slept, studied, and supped in this room.
He walked different roads now. Deeper roads.
How long had he travelled?
All his life, it seemed, though he had been a Wizard for only twenty.
Breathing deep, drawing fingers from his balding scalp to his shaggy white beard, he walked to his main worktable, braced himself for the concentrated recital to come…
The meticulous labour of mapping Seswatha's labyrinthine life.
He had hoped to write a detailed account of everything he could remember. He had developed a talent, over the years, for recollecting what he dreamed. He had literally accumulated thousands of recitals, each the focus of innumerable critiques and speculations. Writing from memory was treacherous enough: Sometimes it seemed as though only the bones of things were actually remembered and that the flesh had to be invented anew with each resurrection. But when it came to the Dreams, everything carried the taint of contrivance, even when they tossed him whole into the heart and bowel of Seswatha's life. The key, he had learned, was to start writing immediately, before the afterimage found itself shouldered into obscurity by the brute insistence of the waking world.
But instead, all he could write was, NAU-CAYTI?
He found himself staring at this ink scribble throughout the morning, the name of Celmomas's famed son, whose theft of the Heron Spear would lead to the No-God's ultimate destruction. In the libraries of the Mandate, dozens if not hundreds of tomes were dedicated to his exploits, the predictable stuff mostly: the Slaying of Tanhafut the Red, his string of victories after the disaster at Shiarau, his death at the hands of his wife, Iлva, and of course the endless interpretations of the Theft. But a few scholars-at least two that Achamian could remember-had focused their attention on the sheer frequency of the Dreams involving Nau-Cayti, which seemed far out of proportion to his short-lived role in the Apocalypse.
But if Seswatha had bedded his mother…
The revelation of adultery was significant in its own right-and it stung the old Wizard for reasons he dare not ponder. But the possibility that Seswatha might be Nau-Cayti's father? Not all facts are equal. Some hang like leaves from the branching of more substantial truths. Others stand like trunks, shouldering the beliefs of entire nations. And a few-a desperate few-are seeds.
He was running through all the details that might allow him to date the dream-which Knight-Chieftains still had favour at the High-King's table, which rings Seswatha wore, the fertility tattoos on the Queen's inner thighs- when one of the children's voices piped through the drone of his failing concentration. 'Yeah, but from how faaaaaar?' A girl's warbling, squeezed into a reed by the distance. Little Silhanna, he realized.
A woman replied, something tender and inaudible.
It was the accent more than the voice that sent him stumbling to the open window. He found himself blinking, gripping the cracked and pitted sill against the sudden vertigo. It was Sheyic, the common tongue of the New Empire, but lilting with southern nuances. Nansur? Ainoni?
He glanced out to the horizon, across what had once been the Galeoth province of Honoreal. The skies were iron grey with the chill-spring promise of summer blue. Climbing and falling canopies jostled across the near distance, a patchwork of tender greens so new that swales of ground could be seen through them. The morning sunlight was still barred from the ravines, so the landscape possessed an oceanic quality; the sunbathed summits and ridge lines resembled yellow islands in a shadowy sea. Even though he couldn't make out the white-backed tributaries of the Rohil, he could see their winding stamp on the disposition of the distant hills, like cables laid across love-tossed sheets.
Strange, the way distances grew in the chill.
The ground immediately below fell away in a series of stubbed terraces, so that looking directly down made it feel as though he were being tugged out the window. There were the outbuildings, little more than lean-tos actually, staking out their humble circle of habitation, and the nearer trees, elms and oaks, winding to heights that would have been eye level had the ground been even. And there were the bare stretches, whose bald stone carried premonitions of smashing melons and broken skulls. He could see nothing of the children, though he did spy a mule staring with daft concentration at nothing in particular.
The voices continued to chirp and gaggle somewhere to the left, on a blade of level earth that formed the foundation for several hoary old maples.
'Momma! Momma!' he heard young Yorsi cry. Then he spied him through the weave of branches, barrelling up the slope. His mother, Tisthanna, strolled down toward him, wiping her hands on her apron and quite-Achamian was relieved to note-unconcerned. 'Look!' Yorsi cried, waving something small and golden.
Then he saw a petite woman climbing in Yorsi's wake, laughing at the four blond children who danced around her, their questions rising in chiming counterpoint. 'What's your mule called?' 'Can I chop your sword?' 'Can I? Can I? Can I?' Her hair was Ketyai black and half-cropped, and she wore a leather cloak whose many-panelled manufacture shouted caste-noble even from such a distance. But given his high vantage and the way she looked down at her little interlocutors, Achamian could see nothing of her face.
He felt a tickle in his throat. How long had it been since their last visitor?
In the beginning, when it had just been him and Geraus, only the Sranc had come. He had lost count of how many times he had lit up the hillside with the Gnosis, sending the vile creatures howling back into the forest deeps. Every tree within bowshot carried some scar of those mad battles: A sorcerer poised on the edge of a half-ruined tower, raining brilliant destruction down on fields of what looked like raving, white-skinned apes. Geraus still suffered nightmares. Afterwards, with the end of the Unification Wars, it had been the Scalpoi, the innumerable Men-Galeoth, Conriyans, Tydonni, Ainoni, even Kianene-who had come to collect the Aspect-Emperor's bounty on Sranc scalps. For years it seemed some blood-mad camp of theirs lay within a day's distance of them. And on more than a few occasions, Achamian had to resort to the Gnosis to cut short their drunken depredations. But even they moved on after time, hunting their vicious prizes into the wilderness's truly primeval deeps. Periodically a troop of them would happen upon the tower, and if they were hungry or otherwise broken by the horrors of their trade, some kind of woe was certain to follow. But then even they ceased coming.
So what had it been? Five, maybe six years since the last visitor had climbed to the foot of their tower?
It had to be. That long at least. There had been those two starving Scalpoi who had come shortly after Geraus had taken Tisthanna for his wife, but after? Certainly not since the last of the children had been born.
No matter, the rule had been simple over the years: Visitors meant grief, the Gods and their laws of hospitality be damned.
Holding hands with one of the girls, the nameless woman came to a friendly stop before Tisthanna, bowed her head in greeting-precisely how far Achamian couldn't tell because of an obscuring tree limb, though it seemed the inclination proper to caste-menials. He could see her boots through a brace of budding twigs, the toe of her left absently scuffing the winter-flat leaves; they were every bit as fine as her ermine-trimmed cloak.
Perhaps she was only equipped like a caste-noble.
Craning his head, he leaned out perilously far, to the point of breaking out in a cold sweat, but to no effect. He heard Tisthanna's whinnying laugh, and it relieved him-somewhat. Tisthanna was nothing if not sensible.
Then the two women were walking side by side into the clearing that encircled the tower's foundation, talking loudly enough to be overheard, but in that close, feminine tone that seemed to baffle masculine ears. Nodding at something, Tisthanna, her blonde hair stacked upon her apple-round face, looked up and gestured to him in the window. Achamian, who leaned stooped out like yard and tackle, tried to pull himself into a more dignified posture. His left foot slipped. The sill-stone beneath his left palm cracked free the rotten mortar-
He nearly followed it clacking down.
Tisthanna let loose an involuntary 'Ooop!' then chortled as Achamian, his long white beard dragging along the stones, carefully palmed his way back to safety.
'Mast-Master Akka!' the children called out in a broken chorus.
The stranger looked up, her delicate face bemused and open and curious…
And something in Achamian suffered a greater fall.