set of mages come along to replace the ones who die, we' ll just have to find some way to train them ourselves. That means reading and writing, too, you know.'
Drago scowled. 'You don't argue fair, Fox.'
'There I must disagree,' Rihwin said. 'Lord Gerin's arguments strike me as logical enough-and logic also seems to me to be a civilized appurtenance worth preserving. The question is whether the risks inherent in seeking to make civilized men of serfs outweigh the benefits to be gained from that course if successful.'
Gerin abruptly sickened of the dispute. 'A murrain on it,' he growled. 'The only thing that truly matters now is who has Duren and what they're doing to him. I said the same thing before we all set out searching, but I hoped we'd know something when we came back to Fox Keep. Instead, here we are sitting along this same cursed table five days later, and just as ignorant as the moment we set out.'
Rihwin gave him a sidelong glance. 'Where chariots rumbling down roadways and men beating bushes fail, sorcery might serve. I speak purely in the abstract, you understand, my own abilities along those lines having been raped away by the angry god, but the possibility deserves mention.'
'It would deserve more mention if I were more of a wizard.' Gerin sighed. 'Oh, aye, you have the right of it, and I'll try, but I've essayed such magics before, and never yet found what I was looking for. And by the time we can find a proper mage and bring him here, the trail will have grown cold.'
'Attempting a spell while convinced it will fail is the surest way to guarantee such failure,' Rihwin said.
'I know that, too, but I find optimism hard to come by when I see no good reason for it.' The Fox wished he could cast aside his gloom. As Rihwin had said, he would have been a better wizard-though never a good one, he thought-without it. But it was as much a part of him as the scar over his left eye.
Just then, Fand came into the great hall. She pointed to Rihwin and Widin and Drago. 'I know they had no luck,' she said. 'Are you after finding your lost boy, and him so small and all?'
'No,' Gerin said, and the one word pressed the weight of defeat and despair more heavily onto his shoulders.
'Och, the black shame of it, to be snatching children,' Fand said. She meant it, Gerin judged, but hers was a nature that held the troubles of others in mind for only a little while before returning to her own concerns: 'And fair lonely I was, too, with both my men off on a sleeveless errand. Still and all, though, they might have brought something back with them to make amends for being gone so long.' She looked hopefully from Gerin to Van.
The outlander answered first: 'Maybe I should bring my hand across your greedy backside. Does that seem fair, when you think on what we were about?'
When Van spoke in that rumbling tone of warning, as if he were an earthquake about to happen, sensible men walked soft. But Fand was nothing if not spirited herself. She shouted, 'Greedy, is it, to be asking a simple question of you? Often enough there's a question you ask of me, aye, and with the understanding my answer had better be yes, too, or I'd be sorry for it. And you call me greedy? A pox take you!'
'If a pox did take me, where would I likely get it?' Van retorted.
'You've been staying with me too long,' Gerin murmured. 'That's the sort of crack I'm apt to make.'
Fand didn't hear him. She let her wrath fall on Van: 'You? Who knows where you'd be likely to come by the pox? You think I don't know you'll cover anything with a slit, like a billy goat in the springtime? I've more to fear from your wanderings than you from mine. Go on, now, tell me I'm a liar.'
Van turned the color of the embers smoldering on the hearth. ' That's the way of a man,' he sputtered. Drago, Rihwin, and Widin nodded. So did Gerin, though he was less inclined to make a tomcat of himself.
'Och, I know that.' Fand tossed her head in fine disdain. 'But since it is, why blame me for what'd be the fault of your own self?'
Gerin worked so hard to choke down laughter that he had a coughing fit. Van wasn't the only one who'd spent a lot of time with him. No toga-wearing Sithonian sophist could have done a neater, more logical job of punching holes in the outlander's gibe than Fand just had.
Van looked his way. 'Will you not come to my aid?' he asked plaintively, as if alone on the field and beset by a host.
'I think our lady here was greedy, too, but as for the rest, you got yourself into it, and you can get yourself out.' Gerin rose and headed for the stairs. 'As for me, I'm going to see what sort of search spells I can use to try to find my son.'
Bass and alto shouts, like angry kettledrum and horn, followed him up to his library. He knew of no greater hoard of books anywhere in the northlands, yet he also knew how inadequate the collection was. There were hundreds of grimoires, for instance, but he owned fewer than ten. With them he had Lekapenos' epics, a few codices of history, a couple on natural philosophy, a treatise on horsemanship, another on war, a school set of Sithonian plays (many of them crumbs from Lekapenos' banquet)-and that was all. So much knowledge stored away in volumes he would never see, let alone own… thinking of his own ignorance saddened him.
He went through the grimoires one after another, looking for a spell that would let him see either who had taken Duren or where his son was now. He found a fair number of them, but had to dismiss most out of hand. Some were beyond his limited abilities as a mage. Some required ingredients he could not hope to obtain: dried sea-cow flipper from the Greater Inner Sea, for instance.
And too many needed wine. Even if it hadn't been unavailable, he would have been afraid to use it. The last thing he wanted was to attract the angry notice of Mavrix.
'I wonder if ale would do?' he muttered, running a finger down the closely written column of a cantrip that looked promising except for prescribing a silver bowl full of wine as the scrying medium.
A sentence near the end of the spell leaped out at him: Whereas the aspect of Baivers god of barley is dull, sodden, and soporific, whilst that of Mavrix lord of the sweet grape (to whom the cry of Evoii! rings out) sparkles with wit and intelligence, the ill-advised operator who seeks to substitute ale for wine will surely have cause to regret his stupidity.
'It was only an idea,' the Fox said, as if talking things over with the author of the grimoire. That author was a Sithonian; though the Fox's copy was an Elabonian translation, he'd already found several scornful references to the westerners who had conquered and then been all but conquered by the more anciently civilized land, and equally short shrift given to other Elabonian gods.
Gerin plucked at his beard as he thought. Substituting butter for olive oil had worked out well enough. No matter what this snooty Sithonian said, using ale in place of wine could also succeed. And he was and always had been on good terms with Baivers. He picked up the grimoire, saying, 'I'll try it.'
He had a silver bowl; it had been at Fox Keep since his grandfather's day. He'd been thinking about melting it down along with the rest of the odd bits of silver in the keep and starting his own coinage. Now he was glad he'd never got round to doing that. And ale, of course, was easy to come by.
He took the bowl and a pitcher of the strongest brew in his cellar out to the shack where he essayed his magics. Before he began the conjuration, he took a while studying the text of the spell, making sure he could slip in Baivers' name and standard epithets for those of Mavrix. He nodded to himself: that ought to work. He didn't think he'd need to modify any of the mystical passes that accompanied the charm.
'I bless thee, Baivers, god of clear sight, and call upon thee: lift the darkness of night,' he intoned, and poured the silver bowl half full of golden ale. He smiled a little when he thought of that; mixing gold and silver, even symbolically, ought to make the spell work better.
As often happened, the sound of his chanting drew Rihwin, who stood in the doorway to see what he was up to. Gerin nodded to him and set a finger to his lips to enjoin silence. Rihwin nodded back; he knew a man working magic did not need and sometimes could not tolerate distraction.
Again, the wizard who had written the grimoire made the operator perform the more difficult passes with his left hand. Again, Gerin gratefully accepted that, because it made the spell easier for him. Soon, he thought, the ale would turn clear as crystal and he would be rewarded with a glimpse of Duren's face, or at least of his surroundings.
He caught himself yawning in the middle of the spell. What's wrong? he thought. He couldn't say it aloud; he was in the middle of the chant. As if from very far away, he watched his sorcerous passes grow languid, listened to his voice turn fuzzy…
'Lord prince! Lord Gerin!'
With a great effort, the Fox opened his eyes. Anxious faces crowding close blocked light from the smoking torches that lit the great hall. Gerin's eyebrows came down and together-last he remembered, he hadn't been in
