For the first time in memory, the city was hum shy;ming with the threat of invasion.
Yet the Shinarion would take place as it always had. So the Kingpriest had decreed. Daily life would not give way to panic; the city would not become an armed camp.
And the city would profit, above all. Most impor shy;tantly, the metal from Thoradin, the silks from Ergoth, the grain from the Solamnic plains, would not have to go elsewhere to be sold.
Already the caravans had embarked for Istar, laden with expensive and exotic goods, and as the time approached, the first of the merchants arrived and the first booths and bazaars went up in the rapidly filling city. By the end of the week the num shy;bers would be greater still. Balandar claimed that the population of Istar doubled during the Shinarion.
Hidden by a carved screen, Vincus watched the arrivals from his master's library window. As wine steward for the Kingpriest's Tower, Balandar was busy all the time now, and Vincus was often left to his own devices. He divided his time between secretly reading obscure manuscripts and nosing through the crowded Marketplace, watching the preparations for the festival.
In most years, the arrivals were exotic-almost enough to make the young servant believe that the city did not go on forever-that the legendary lands that travelers described were actual and true.
The acrobats had come, and the fortune-tellers and dancers. A band of dwarven musicians was expected on the festival eve, and rumors even had it that Shardos, the fabled blind juggler, would attend and entertain.
But this year the first arrivals were somehow dis shy;turbing. Vincus wandered the Marketplace, seem shy;ingly casual, but totally observant. The acrobats, huge and hulking, practiced their stunts badly, the dancers seemed surly, and the fortune-tellers tight-lipped and private. The dwarves and the juggler were long overdue and the young servant began to suspect that the more famous, legitimate acts would not perform this year.
He saw few rehearsals, and the fortune-tellers' predictions, when they came, were tentative and vague:
Today is your lucky day.
You are more insightful than ordinary folk.
Your future is bright.
Not legitimate. That was it, Vincus was sure. The arrivals were impostors.
At first, Vincus was hesitant to bring up the matter to the druid. Vaananen, preoccupied with his rena garden, had little love for acrobats and dancers- they did not suit his austere western ways.
But finally, two nights before the festival was scheduled to begin, Vincus slipped through the druid's window. Vaananen did not stir. He crouched, as usual, in the rena garden, drawing a rairfglyph.
The rena garden had grown, Vincus noted. Vaana shy;nen had dismantled one of the wooden walls that kept the sand in place, and now it sprawled onto the floor, spreading like a creature with volition of its own. The druid had added another stone and a squat green barrel cactus to the stark, mysterious arrangement of objects in the sand, and two new glyphs adorned the far walled edge of the garden.
Then Vaananen noticed him, rose and turned, his meditations over.
'What have you brought me, Vincus?' he asked with a weary smile.
Vincus's dark hands flashed the first of four elabo shy;rate signs.
Vaananen laughed. 'Impostors? Why, Vincus, all fortune-tellers are impostors.'
Vincus shook his head, his fingers a blur.
Vaananen turned back to the garden. 'You have tried hard,' he announced. 'Thank you.'
Vincus shrugged, scratched beneath his silver col shy;lar. Perhaps he was wrong after all. He rose and turned toward the window, stepped to the sill…
And climbed out into the close Istarian night, leaving the druid to contemplate the cactus, the stone, the shifting shapes in the sand.
Vaananen might dismiss the suspicion, might laugh it away in his quiet meditation. But there was something different about the city-something strange and curiously out of line. Vincus was accus shy;tomed to watching the streets, to sensing with eye and ear and an insight more subtle than the senses when something had shifted, when something was not right.
And it was that feeling, that insight, that took him back to Balandar's library.
Always before, the library had been a place of peace for Vincus-a maze of sanctuary amid tower shy;ing shelves, with its powerful smells of mildew and old leather emanating from the long-neglected vol shy;umes. As a slave boy, illiterate at first, sold to the tower to repay his father's debts, he had taken books down from the high, obscure shelves to pore over at night after his master was abed. Slowly, his intelli shy;gence had matched the illuminated drawings in the margins of the ancient texts with the shapes of let shy;ters. It was like reading glyphs, this long process that had translated indecipherable scrawls into meaning, into things and ideas.
It had taken all of a year, but he had taught him shy;self to read in the shadowy, candlelit room.
Each time he returned he felt the same absorbing calm and quietude. This time he came as an intruder, a spy, gathering intelligence.
Silently, he thumbed through old Balandar's records. In a shabby old book the priest had kept account of the temple wineries for years, since before the Siege of Sorcery and long before Vincus himself had been born. He had dwelt upon this very book learning his letters and numbers: 'claret' and 'malmsey' were among the first words he could read.
Looking at the most recent records, those of the last several months, Vincus quickly tallied the num shy;ber of wine barrels brought from the warm north into the Kingpriest's cellar.
The expensive claret was the Kingpriest's favorite, reserved for only the highest clergy. One barrel^ month sufficed, and Vincus noted no change in the order. Nor in the malmsey, which the lesser clerics and the officers drank with a certain. . license. Seven barrels this month, six the month before, and six before that.
Vincus nodded. A slight increase in the malmsey. Festival time.
The port, however, was the soldiers' wine. Rationed to the Istarian men at arms, it was issued in the barracks and taken afield. The Istarian soldier was naked without his wineskin.
Vincus smiled, adding the numbers.
Ten barrels, then eleven, and this month. . twenty-two.
Vincus absently fingered his silver collar. There was a marked increase in the port wine, far beyond festival allowances, beyond common sense. It defi shy;nitely supported his suspicion.
Someone new was in the city. Unannounced, unaccounted for.
And port was the wine of soldiers.
Chapter 13
The first night of the Shinarion spangled the city with a gaudy light. In the quiet, less-traveled pockets of the city, marbled squares and opal windows shone with the borrowed glow of Lunitari, red and darkly bril shy;liant like candlelight on wine. But the lamps and the torches drowned the busy commons and thorough shy;fares with the flashy light of commerce, and like a respected matron who has drained the glass once too often, the elegant city burgeoned with a loud, inelegant life.
Yet those who had been here before knew other shy;wise-knew that this year was unlike any that had come before. This time the celebration was fevered, almost desperate, and the promised thousands of pil shy;grims, merchants, and performers had yet to arrive.
Nonetheless, the festival caroused from the center of the Marketplace, the beating heart of the trading, where jewelry, silks, and spices changed hands, to the booths by the gates of the city, where vendors and hucksters sold fireworks, knives, and the red glass bottles of godslight-the strange, everburning mixture of phosfire and salt, dangerous and volatile, that, if handled wisely and cautiously, would pro shy;vide steady light for weeks.
No one, however, expected wisdom and caution from a drunken reveler. Already Peter Bomberus, commander of the city militia, had been called to extinguish three fires by the city walls.
Two had been simple wooden lean-tos-the kind of makeshift dwellings that followed the festivals from Hylo to Balifor. But the third was different: a permanent dwelling, hard by the School of the Games, the dry wooden rafters
