glamour art above them.
The Shadows did not attend the pageant. That week, Silverdun returned to Annwn to deliver a hefty sum of gold to Magyster Wenathn, who won his reelection bid handily. Wenathn now had his sights set on election to high council, and the Shadows were more than happy to assist him in any way possible. Useful intelligence soon began to flow from him as their relationship deepened.
Silverdun's spring was primarily taken up, however, with the reviewing of an endless stream of intelligence from sources far and wide, looking for any sign of Mab's intentions, and finding scant little. Unseelie forces continued to build near the border, albeit slowly, but no solid indication that this was meant as anything other than posturing was forthcoming. Nor was there any information about the Einswrath weapon, or why it had not been used anywhere since Selafae.
Ironfoot spent most of his time at Blackstone Manor, his maps spread out before him, performing calculations, but his anger at being unable to discern the workings of the Einswrath had turned to despair and then disillusionment as he began to believe that the problem was unsolvable. He developed a rhythm during the spring: He would work the problem until he began to feel violent, and then he would push it aside for a few days and join Sela and Silverdun in scanning intelligence.
Both Ironfoot and Silverdun noticed their Gifts steadily increasing in power, but as they rarely found themselves in significant danger, no more marvels such as Silverdun's regrown hand or Ironfoot's burst of Leadership took them by surprise. They spoke of it often at first, and Ironfoot had undertaken some research on the side to try to determine what had been done to them, but such inquiry went nowhere, and as Ironfoot already had one impossible problem in front of him, he had no great desire to commit to another.
As Everess had predicted, no progress was ever made on the murder of Guildsman Heron; ultimately the official pronouncement came down from the high prosecutor's office that it had been a robbery attempt gone wrong. A patsy had been arrested and hung, and the matter dropped. Guildmistress Heron had resigned and gone to live with relatives in the East. After her resignation, another of Everess's predictions came true. The Arcadian Lord Palial was appointed by Corpus to take her place.
Sela was sent out on assignments from time to time, usually by herself, usually to cajole information from male informants who had proved less than forthcoming. Due to Paet's constant and strenuous objections, she undertook no more assassinations on Seelie soil.
When not on assignment, she and Silverdun studiously ignored one another. Her feelings for him only grew, however, and while she sensed that he felt the same way, something kept them apart, some reservation on Silverdun's part that caused them never to be alone in the same room together, and never to speak of anything other than work.
As a result, she found herself spending more and more time upstairs, with the analysts. As time passed, she grew to enjoy teasing out information from among the stacks and stacks of disparate documents, working out how to apply it, how to sense patterns. It was a different way to use her skill with Empathy, and she much preferred it to the way she'd been taught.
Paet allowed his Shadows a certain amount of leisure, but that was only because he sensed that rough times were ahead. Cries for war continued to escalate in Corpus, and there would soon come a time when cooler heads would cease to prevail. When war came, as he knew it would sooner or later, the lives of the Shadows would change in ways they couldn't imagine.
Spring grew; Faerie warmed; the waters of the Inland Sea grew calm and lost their chill. Spring, however, was only a season. Summer would come soon enough, and then autumn would be back for more.
The cynosures are objects with remarkable thaumatic properties, though because they are objects of worship the Chthonics do not allow them to be studied. Twelve were created in the wake of the Rauane Envedun-e, but it is not known how many of them are still in existence, as the Chthonic priests refuse to discuss them in any detail.
The philosophical significance of the cynosure is multifarious. Its wholeness represents the wholeness of the spirit. Its size, the area of each face, the angle of each vertex, the length of each side, all relate to both the religious and thaumatic aspect of the object. As I will show in the following chapter, the two can be seen as indistinguishable.
-Prae Benesile, Thaumatical History of the Chthonic Religion
ourneyer Timha sat in Master Valmin's study, stuck on a passage in Beozho's Commentaries. It was an exceedingly dense passage in a work well known for its obliqueness. Alpaurle himself had referred to it as 'the ravings of a great man in decline.' Over the centuries, scholars had debated the value of the work; for a tome ostensibly about thaumaturgy, there was very little spellwork in it. The Coninientaries was, rather, a massive philosophical work, littered with partial references to and quotations from documents that had been lost to the ages, but which Beozho clearly expected his audience to be deeply familiar with. About these secondary documents, Alpaurle had com- mented, 'some are works of genius, others flights of fancy, and yet others are intellectual self-pleasure.'
