made him shiver. Closing the window, he crossed the room to sit on the rug before the fire. He thought he had been prepared for anything, but the sight of the Queen had shaken him. She was stunningly beautiful, and despite his love for Maeg, he found in himself a yearning for Sigarni that he would not have believed possible.
For some time he sat there, then felt the draft on his back as the door opened.
Sigarni entered. She was dressed now in a simple woolen shirt of white that showed the curve of her breasts, and dark brown leggings that highlighted her long, slim legs. She sat down on the bed. No more the Queen, she looked now like a clanswoman-tall and strong, fearless and free. Her mouth was astonishingly inviting, and Caswallon found his heart beating wildly.
“What are you thinking, my wizard?” she asked, her voice more husky than he recalled from her greeting in the hall.
“You are very beautiful, lady.”
“And you are changed,” she said softly, her grey eyes holding to his gaze.
“In what way?” he countered.
Sigarni slid off the bed to sit next to him by the fire. “When I greeted you I saw the surprise in your eyes. And now I am here beside you-and yet you do not seek to hold me. What has happened to you, Redhawk? Have you forsaken me for another? I will understand if that is true. By Heaven, I have said my share of farewells to lovers. I would hope to have the strength to accept similar treatment. Is that what is happening here?”
“No,” he said, his mind reeling. Moving back from her, he stood and returned to the window. The moon was high over the mountains and he stared up at the sky, fighting to make sense of her words. They were lovers! How could this be? For Caswallon loyalty was not like a cloak, to be worn or discarded, but an iron code to live by. And yet. ..
“Talk to me, Redhawk,” said Sigarni.
He swung to face her. Once more her beauty struck him like an arrow. “Taliesen told me that you understood the Gateways. You know, therefore, that they allow us to move through time as well as to other lands?”
“Of course,” she told him. “What has that to do with you and me?”
He took a deep breath. “In all my life I have seen you only four times. Once as a babe in the forest, the second time by Ironhand’s Falls, the third”-he hesitated and looked away-“in my own realm… and the fourth tonight in the great hall. Everything you say to me-about us-is… new and strange. If we are to be lovers, it is not now but in a time-for me-that is yet to be. As I stand here I have a wife, Meg, whom I adore, and a small child, Donal.” He saw she was about to speak and raised his hand. “Please say nothing, for I know I would never betray Maeg while she lived. And I do not want to know what the future holds for her.”
Sigarni rose, her face thoughtful. “You are a good man, Redhawk, and I love you. I will say nothing of Maeg…” She smiled. “Just as you hesitated about our meeting in your own realm. I will leave you now. We will talk in the morning.”
“Wait!” he called out as she opened the door. “There is something I must ask of you.”
“The debt,” she said. Then, noting his incomprehension, she smiled softly. “You always said there would come a time when you would ask me a great favor. Whatever it is, I will grant it. Good night, Redhawk.”
“You are a rare woman, Sigarni.”
Turning back, she nodded. “You will one day say that to me with even more feeling,” she promised.
Taliesen sat alone in the semidarkness of his viewing chamber. It was cold, and idly he touched a switch to his right. Warm air flowed through hidden steel vents in the floor and he removed his cloak. Leaning back against the headrest of the padded leather chair, he stared at the paneled ceiling, his mind tired, his thoughts fragmented.
He transferred his gaze to the gleaming files. Eight hundred years of notes, discoveries, failures, and triumphs.
Useless.
All of it…
How could the Great Gates have closed?
And why were the Middle Gates shrinking year by year?
The Infinity Code had been broken a century before his birth by the scientist Astole. The first Gate-a window really-had been set up the following year. It had seemed then that the Universe itself had shrunk to the size of a small room.
By the time Taliesen was a student his people had seen every star, every minor planet. Gates had been erected on thousands of sites from Sirius to Saptatua. Linear time had snapped back into a Gordian knot of interwoven strands. It was a time of soaring arrogance and interstellar jests. Taliesen himself had walked upon many planets as a god, enjoying immensely the worship of the planet-bound humanoids. But as he grew older such cheap entertainment palled and he became fascinated by the development of Man.
Astole, his revered teacher, had fallen from grace, becoming convinced of some mystic force outside human reality. Mocked and derided, he had left the order and vanished from the outer world. Yet it was he who had first saved the baby, Sigarni. Taliesen felt a sense of relief. For years he had feared a rogue element amid the complexities of his plans. Now that fear vanished.
He understood now the riddle of the Hawk Eternal.
“You and I will teach him, Astole,” he said, “and we will save my people.” A nagging pain flared in his left arm, and rubbing his biceps, he rose from the chair. “Now I must find you, old friend,” he said. “I shall begin by revisiting the last place Caswallon saw you.” His fingers spasmed as a new pain lanced into his chest. Taliesen staggered to his chair, fear welling within him. He scrabbled for a box on the desktop, spilling its contents. Tiny capsules rolled to the floor… With trembling fingers he reached for them. There was a time when he would have needed no crudely manufactured remedies, no digitalis derived from foxglove. In the days of the Great Gates he could have traveled to places where his weakened heart would have been regenerated within an hour. Youth within a day! But not now. His vision swam. The fear became a tidal wave of panic that circled his chest with a band of fire. Oh, please, he begged. Not now!
The floor rose to strike his head, pain swamping him.
“Just one more… day,” he groaned.
His fingers clenched into a fist as a fresh spasm of agony ripped into him.
And as he died the Gates vanished.
During the week that followed Caswallon’s departure Maggrig led his Pallides warriors on a series of killing raids, hitting the Aenir at night, peppering them with arrows from woods and forests. Leofas, with four hundred Farlain clansmen, circled the Aenir force and attacked from the south.
Whenever the Aenir mustered for a counterattack the clans melted away, splitting their groups to re-form at agreed meeting places.
The raids were no more than a growing irritation to Asbidag, despite the disruption of his supply lines and the loss of some three hundred warriors. The main battle was what counted, and the clans could not run forever.
But where was Barsa? Nothing had been heard of his son and the Timber Wolves he led.
Drada trapped a raiding party of twenty Pallides warriors in a woods twelve miles from Attafoss, and these- bar one-were summarily butchered. The prisoner was tortured for seven hours, but revealed nothing. He had been blood-eagled on a wide tree. But the main force, led by Maggrig, escaped to the north, cutting through the ring of steel Drada had thrown around the woods. Still, twenty of the enemy had been slain, and Drada was not displeased.
In the southeast Gaelen and his companions had found more than eighty Pallides warriors in the caves of Pataron, a day’s march from Carduil. These he had persuaded to march with him on his return. It was a start.
On the fifth day of travel Gaelen and his group entered the thick pines below Carduil, and as they climbed they felt the chill of the wind blowing down from the snowcapped peaks. As they neared the opening to a narrow pass, a tall woman in leather breeches and a hooded sheepskin jerkin stepped out from the trees, a bow half drawn in her hands.
“Halt where you stand,” she commanded.
“We are seeking Laric,” Gaelen told the clanswoman.
“Who are you?”
