BUT IT WAS TO BE a long time before Jaldis the Blind and his pupil found the peace and security necessary for the weaving of another Dark Well.
It took them two days to reach Imber, a good-sized market town twenty-five miles upriver from Felsplex, built around the temple complex of Ptorag, God of Grain. In most of the Forty Realms Ptorag's worship had been supplanted by that of Shilmarglinda - the north-desert deity of all the fruits of the earth - but in Imber it was still strong and the cult owned most of the vineyards lining the hill slopes above the river. Rhion, having ascertained that he had, in fact, dropped the little velvet pouch which Tepack the Moneylender's wife had given him - brainless trollop! - into the blanket's load of books and spare clothes, figured resignedly that if worst came to worst he could always seek employment corking and sealing bottles when the vintage was laid down toward winter's end.
"But on the other hand," he added, extending numb hands toward the small brazier of coals which the landlady of the Red Grape Inn had sent up to their miniscule - though extremely costly - chamber, "if everyone in this town is as calm about wizards as the innkeeper here, I can probably find work as an accountant. That would make my father proud." He grinned a little as he said it, his beard crackling with ice, and began gingerly unwrapping the frozen rags he'd tied around his hands. They hadn't the money to remain more than a night or two at this inn, and he'd have to sell the tiny amount of gold they kept for talismanic work in order to obtain permanent lodgings; but, for the moment, Rhion was glad to have found a warm room out of the wind, with prospects of food.
He flexed his fingers in the glow exuded by the little copper dish of coals. "Here, let me see your hands..." In the river-bank cave where they'd spent part of yesterday morning, sheltering from the worst of the sleet, he'd cut strips from the hem of their former landlord's cloak - which was too long for him anyway - to wrap around Jaldis' arthritic fingers and his own. He'd hauled stones up from the river-bank and had been able to call sufficient spells to them to heat them up so that their radiant warmth had kept him and his master from freezing to death, but the effort had exhausted him; Jaldis had worked for nearly two hours, drawing and redrawing the figures of power in the air, before he had been able to turn the sleet storm aside. After that the old man had collapsed and slept; when they'd pushed on later in the day and all through the next southward along the banks of the frozen stream, he had the strength to say very little.
Or perhaps, Rhion thought now, stealing a worried glance at his master's face, the delicate cords of gut and silver wire, the tiny vibrating whistles and membranes within the voice-box itself, had simply frozen fast.
Now the old man said softly, as Rhion chaffed his crippled fingers in a basin of cold water, "I am sorry, my son."
"Sorry?" Rhion looked up at him in genuine surprise. Outside the windows, the short winter day had ended in slate-colored gloom. In the kitchen directly beneath their room, the innkeeper's husband was singing a midwinter carol as he prepared supper for the Red Grape's few guests: roast lamb with rosemary for those wealthy enough to pay for it, lentils and mutton-fat for itinerant mages out of work. "I was the one who sold that silly woman a love-potion without asking if she was married or whom she was going to use it on." Gently he removed the two cloaks and the blanket from Jaldis' shoulders and laid them over the backs of the room's various chairs and table to dry. While it was possible to dry clothes, as it was to heat rooms, with magic, under ordinary circumstances it took far more energy than it was worth. In the long run it was cheaper to pay for coal.
For a moment he stood looking down at Jaldis' sunken cheeks and scarred eyelids, gray as fishbelly with fatigue and with long weeks indoors at the Black Pig. He remembered as from a dream how his white teeth had flashed in a smile, how his voice had boomed with laughter, the day of their first meeting on the bridge. Down to the ends of his long white braids, he had seemed to crackle with energy, with life and delight... with magic. And Rhion had known, as unquestioningly as if he had recognized his own face in a mirror, that that was what he wanted, and had always wanted, to be.
Quietly, he added, "I'm sorry about the books."
The hard, arthritic grip closed with its surprising strength upon his hand. "It was not your business to ask her if she would use the philter to commit adultery," Jaldis said. "No more than it is the business of a stationer to ask of a man buying paper and ink if he plans to use them to betray a friend's trust. Magic is only magic, Rhion."
The sparse white eyebrows drew down over the bridge of his nose, the thin face filled with urgency, willing him to understand. "It is neither evil nor good, it is neither health nor a sickness. It is only what it is - like a knife, or a man's life, or a new name for God. We cannot begin to judge what will be done with any of these things, for we ourselves can only hold opinions, and we cannot be sure that the information we are given on any of these is complete or correct.
"It is enough that we do no harm, as our vows enjoin us; that we do not presume to decide things for which there is no proof." The crooked, claw-like fingers tightened; as the blind face looked up into his, Rhion had the sensation that through those deformed hands the old man could feel, not only his bones and flesh and the warmth of his blood, but the soul within him, reading it like a handful of colored silk ribbons braided into some elaborate code, feeling the texture of his thoughts as he would feel the petals of a flower, the grit of granite, or the cold strength of steel.
"I am only sorry," Jaldis went on, "that having promised you the wisdom of the universe, the knowledge of balance and truth, I have caused you to leave your family and the world that would have made you comfortable, and then have given you only this: dream weaving, philter brewing, and casting horoscopes and luck-charms, the toys of magic rather than its substance. It is not magic, Rhion..."
Rhion was silent, remembering the soul-deep shiver he had felt when he had first understood the true name of light, the name by which fire is summoned - the true reality of what true reality is. The moment in meditation when all the component parts of the world fell suddenly together, showing that there was, in fact, sense to what happened... He remembered, too, all that long and gaudy parade of nobles, burghers, farmers, and slaves who had come to him and Jaldis over the past ten years, asking for what they thought was magic: medicines or luck-charms or to have their fortunes read. And every one, he reflected, had taught him a little more about what men dreamed.
"No," he said, squeezing those crippled old fingers in return. "But it sure beats working for a living."
And Jaldis laughed, sniffing through his high-bridged nose. Laughter was the one sound that it was impossible for the voice-box to make.
Acting on the advice of the innkeeper's husband, a little brown sparrow of a man whom he instinctively trusted, Rhion sought out the best of the local pawnbrokers the following day and sold the little gold and silver he and Jaldis possessed. With the proceeds, again on their landlord's advice, he found a widow who owned a garden farm a few hundred yards down the road outside Imber's gates, who had a room to rent.
"Now, I don't mind myself that you're witchylike," she said, pouring the milk bucket she carried into setting pans - Rhion had found her in the dairy behind the small, half-timbered box of the farmhouse. She turned to face him, tucking hard brown hands into the armpits of her quilted coat for warmth. She was a young woman of about Rhion's own twenty-seven years, though her face was leathery with outdoor work. Under the close-fitting cap widows wore in the low countries of the Fel Valley her braids were bright yellow; she wore a blue ribbon around her neck with a green spirit-bead upon it and a little fragment of mirror glass to scare away grims. "It's just that I don't want no trouble, see."
"We'll try to keep the orgies down to four or five a week," Rhion replied gravely, and then added, "joking... joking..." as her eyebrows dove down into a worried frown. "It's just myself and my old master; we may have clients coming from time to time but I promise you we're well behaved." And one of these days I'll even learn to have some sense about what I say.
She grinned, showing a gap where childbearing had cost her a tooth. "Well, as to that, if the magistrates ask why I rented to such folk, I can always say you put a Word on me, can't I? I've sold milk and greens to the wizards in the town enough to know they don't cut up children, no matter what my granny said. But, not meaning it personal, I've got a girl - three she'll be come Agonsfire Night - and I'd appreciate it if you'd stay clear of her. Just for the sake of what the neighbors say."
For God's sake, your daughter's honor is safe with me... "Of course," said Rhion, bowing with hand over heart.
"Are there wizards in Imber?" he asked Jaldis later, as the two men carried their meager possessions across the town square and down the cobbled lane to the western gate. The snow that had been drifting down all last night had ceased, leaving the sky overhead a high, nebulous roof of pewter. Farmers had set up their barrows under the wide arcade surrounding the market square, and housewives in yellows and greens, and the dark-dressed household slaves of the rich, were picking over bundles of beans and yams and prodding the rabbits and chickens which hung dead by their feet like grotesque tassels from hooks on the beams overhead. The square itself was a palimpsest of tracks in the churned-up snow, and now and then a mule litter or sedan chair would pass, carrying a rich man on his way to one of the town's gymnasia or baths, or a brown-robed priest of the great temple of Ptorag, archaic gold amulets flashing and temple secretaries trotting obediently in his wake.
"They are Selarnists." Jaldis' voice was incapable of expression, but by the pause before his reply and by the way he held his shoulders, he might have been identifying them as a species of roach. "A small House of them, I believe."
"Oh," Rhion said. He had met few members of the Selarnist Order of wizardry in his years of apprenticeship with Jaldis, mostly because members of the White Order, as it was called, tended to live cloistered in Houses wherever the local authorities would let them, shunning contact with politics, the public, and members of other Orders alike.
"Worthy enough mages, I suppose," the old man went on, the voice of the soundbox smooth and strong now that he had rested, the rhythm of his arms and back as he limped along steady and sure. "And their methods of teaching are, on the whole, sound." When he had taught Rhion to observe insects he had found several good things to say about the lowlier members of the grasshopper tribe as well. "But one must admit that their Order's studies have become considerably corrupted and filled with errors since first they split away from the Morkensiks, six hundred years ago."
They passed a school, thickly attended now that it was winter, boys and girls crowded eight to a bench and peering over one another's shoulders at the hornbooks they had to share. Warmth blew out of the open store-front in which it was being held, pleasant on Rhion's face as he walked along under his blanketful of books. It was astounding how much easier they were to carry on the relatively level surface of the street, the packed and slippery snow underfoot notwithstanding. Jaldis, too, had insisted upon splitting the load with him, and though Rhion watched him carefully, the old man seemed strong and fit enough.
"You could do worse than go to the Selarnists for some teaching while we are here," Jaldis added as he and his pupil turned down the length of Westgate Lane, past the towering walls of the temple complex, beyond which the soft groaning of horns and of the bronze sounding-bowls could be heard, accompanying chanted prayers in languages few people understood anymore. "Though they tend to put too much emphasis on breath-control and physical orientation, they could teach you far more of the finer nuances of herbalism than I."
"If they're Selarnists they might not want to teach a Morkensik their secrets," Rhion pointed out, shifting his burden from one aching shoulder to the other. His muscles hadn't recovered yet from the scramble across the roofs or from the hours of rowing up the white-banked black silence of the river with the sleet stinging his face. "But it's worth a try. There's still a whole lot I don't understand about herbal metaphysics..."
"Much of it is practice, my son."
"True. But in any case, if the priests who rule this town let a whole Houseful of them stay here, they won't have any objections to the two of us."
And indeed, it was not the priests of Ptorag who were responsible, two days later, for having Rhion and Jaldis thrown out of town.
It was a morning warmer than the preceding week had been, warm enough that the river had begun to thaw. Clouds hung low over the hill country to the south, and a faint mist turned the air to pearl as Rhion crossed the farmyard from helping their landlady with the milking, and found Jaldis sitting at the little table under their room's wide window, arranging his books by touch.
When Rhion had first become Jaldis' student, he had known nothing of wizardry - only the desperate sense of the magic within his veins, and the insistent, terrifying, disorienting need to learn to use that ability, the need to know that he was not insane for wanting to. But he had assumed, meeting Jaldis, that magic was something one learned, like accounting. When one was done learning, one was a bookkeeper.
It had come as both a shock to him and, once the shock was over, a delight, that magic was a learning, a pursuit - that one never finished learning magic. The learning had been longer, a deep foundation against whose painstaking meticulousness he had rebelled more than once in screaming boredom: for the first year and a half he hadn't realized Jaldis had been teaching him anything. All the old man did was command the boy to do things like prepare the floors of rooms where magic was done, ritually cleansing every corner and ritually laying wards on every door, window, pot, knife, and vessel, and in between times simply enjoined him to observe insects and plants, clouds and stars and rain... It was only after he had amassed years' worth of information, of tiny detail - until he could tell at a glance the seed of the amaranth from that of the millet - that it came to him how necessary all this information was to the weaving of spells that could change poison to harmless sap, or steer the cumuli by altering the temperature of the air beneath them.
For Jaldis, he knew, learning had never stopped. There were always new plants to study, whole new families of them from the jungles of the south or the bare rock plains of the north and west; spells that had been woven, and written, and lost again; unknown properties of gems or salts or different types of animal blood. He'd seen Jaldis bouncing up and down like a schoolboy one afternoon when they'd visited Shavus at his queer stone house in the forest of Beldirac, and the Archmage had shown off a century-old scroll containing fifty or sixty alterations to spells which strengthened or lessened their effects, depending on the position of certain stars. Rhion had spent a month copying it out - it was one of the books that had been left in the attic.
"I meant to ask you," Rhion said, untucking the folds of his robe from his wide leather belt. "Was there a reason you couldn't summon fog to cover us, when we were getting out of Felsplex? Did working with the Dark Well hurt you that much? Or was there just not enough time?"
"The Dark Well... tired me, yes." Jaldis half turned in his chair. "It saps power, drinks it..." The diffuse white light that came through the window's oiled parchment panes lent a matte yellow-gray tone to his lined face, making him look tired and ill. He'd been wearing his spectacles to accustom himself to his new surroundings; they lay now on the table beside his hand, and the air was permeated with the bittersweet pungence of lime and rue he'd burned to relieve the headache that was the result.
"That was one reason why it so grieved me that the Well was destroyed - that we had to leave it and that men, in fear, will rub out the Circles of Power which hold its darkness in place. It will be some time before I regain the strength to undertake the making of another."
The longer, the better, as far as I'm concerned, Rhion thought, a little guiltily.
"At the equinox, perhaps," Jaldis went on, turning back to the ordering of his books with crooked, groping hands. "The turning of the spring, when I can use the momentum of the forces of the stars to help me. The evening star will be in transit then, too, which should help - there are spells which call down its power at such times which I must teach you. It is imperative..." He broke off, and shook his head, a quick, small gesture, dismissing the preoccupation which, Rhion knew, had been gnawing at him all through their flight.
Then he looked up again, a small, closed smile flexing the scarred corners of his lips. "But as for the fog... I could not work two spells at once, Rhion. Not two spells as dissimilar as weather-spinning and summoning."
"Summoning?" Rhion perched one flank on the corner of the table and frowned. "Summoning what?"
"Summoning the books back to us." And his smile widened as if he could see his pupil's expression of startled, enlightened delight. "Have I never shown you the sigils to draw, the spells to weave, to convince an object that its proper place is in your possession?"
"I didn't even know such spells existed, but tell me more." He drew up another chair. Compared to the Black Pig, the room was hopelessly primitive - damply cold, so that both of them wore their cloaks and kept their blankets wrapped around them most of the time, the beds only platforms built of planks and covered with straw, and the whole place smelling of the barnyard onto which it looked. Rhion suspected from the stains on the scoured stone floor that the thatch would leak come spring. But it was clean, and the landlady was liberal in her interpretation of the word board.
"I thought the books were burned."
Jaldis sighed, and nodded. "And indeed, they probably were." The sweet voice was incapable of tone, but his eyebrows drew down in a faint twinge of pain, like a man who speaks of friends rumored dead in some catastrophe. Then he shook his head, gestured the thoughts aside with the two fingers still mobile upon his right hand.
"But in the event that some of them were not, in the event that they were thrown into the midden, or cast out the window, the spells I laid upon them - if my strength was sufficient at that point for any spell to work - would cause them to be found by someone who would see in them a source of income, and not an insult to whatever god he was taught to revere. And the spells - if they had worked thus far - would lead that woman or man to sell them to a dealer, perhaps, who might be journeying to Imber when the roads clear in summer, or to an antiquarian, or a seller of used paper, who would in turn, if chances so fell out, display them along with his other wares at a time when you or I or someone who knows us would be passing his shop. That is the reason I never neglect to examine the wares of old paper dealers - one reason of many. Here..." He reached with one stiff claw and drew the Grimoire of Weygarth to him, opening its crumbling leather covers to stroke the parchment within. Across the faded illuminations of the tide page his finger traced a dim line of blue-white fight that flickered like a live thing in the pallid gloom, then seemed to sink into the page itself, like a colored ribbon laid upon water.
"It is a spell like other sigils of summoning, but comprised of the Lost Rune, and that of the Dancer, accompanied by the words..."
Three shadows passed the soft brightness of the windows and Rhion touched Jaldis' wrist in warning. A moment later there was a faint, polite scratching at the rough plank door.
The man who stood on the threshold was middle-aged, the woman elderly. Both were clothed in the white wool robes, the long white cloaks, and the simple wooden beads of the Selarnist Order of wizardry. Rhion's landlady stood in the background, her skirt still rucked up from work and her muddy boots showing beneath it, her hands shoved for warmth into her sleeves.
The male wizard inclined his head. "Are you Jaldis the Blind and his pupil Rhion?"
"I'm Rhion, yes. Come in." He stepped back from the door, but neither of the two visitors made any move to follow him inside. A moment later he heard the scrape of Jaldis' chair legs on the stone, and then the almost soundless tap of crutches and rustle of robes.
"I am Chelfrednig of Imber, and this in Niane. We understand that you have come to stay in Imber."
"For a time," Rhion said, hiking his cloak a little higher over his shoulder. He mistrusted the man's tone, the cool distance of his manner. It was something he recognized, the attitude that said, Don't blame ME for what's going to happen. It's nothing personal...
"It's nothing personal..."
"Fine." Rhion lifted a hand amicably. "At this short an acquaintance I have nothing personal against you, either. Now that we've established that..."
"We understand that yesterday you sold a good-luck charm to a slave named Benno, who works at the shrine of Mhorvianne."
"He didn't tell me his name," he said, more cautious still, "but yes, I did make a talisman of good fortune for a man who came here, and by the way he dressed I figured him for a lower servant or a slave."
With a quickness that reminded Rhion irresistibly of carnival-show sleight of hand, Chelfrednig produced a round billet of elderwood, roughly the size of a double-weight copper penny, from his sleeve and held it out. Rhion did not touch it. Upon it he recognized his own elaborately interwoven seals, spelled to attract circumstances of pleasantness and peace, of good feeling and fortunate coincidence. As he had explained to the man who had come to them yesterday, no magic could turn aside true misfortune, just as no magic could bring the thundering strokes of great luck that change a person's life - and he didn't think his first client in Imber had wanted to believe him. But as far as it went, the little emblem was good for a few extra rolls of dice, for a capricious master's change of mood when a slave had broken a dish, or for an extra jog at the memory about a pot left on the stove. And what more, Rhion thought, could you do for a slave?
With his forefinger he pushed his spectacles a little more firmly up onto the bridge of his nose, and waited.
"We of our House," Chelfrednig said sententiously, 'have striven over the years to achieve a harmony with the authorities of this town, the priests of Ptorag, the local magistrates, and the Earl of Way's governor. We believe we have convinced them that those born with the powers of wizardry, if properly instructed and disciplined, are not monsters, nor are they traitors to the gods and to humankind; that we do not hold orgies at the turning points of the universe and do not slit children's throats to make magic with their blood. And we have done this by keeping ourselves to ourselves, and by refraining from meddling with the lives of anyone in this town."
"That's very nice," said Rhion grimly. "Who pays your rent?"
"Investments," the White Mage replied, with a dismissive gesture of one gloved hand. "But the fact remains that our living depends upon the sufferance of the local authorities. And this..." He took Rhion's hand in his, and placed the talisman in the plump palm. "...we cannot have."
Rhion heard Jaldis come up behind him; a swift glance back showed him the cold flash of daylight on the opal-and-crystal spectacles that the old man had donned.
"You cannot deny us our right," the old man said, "to make a living."
"Ah." Under a long flow of herb-scented beard, Chelfrednig's mouth flexed in a small, tolerant smile. "I had forgotten that when the Morkensiks split off from the Selarnist Order they conveniently dropped the portion of the Oath not to concern oneself in the affairs of humankind..."
"It was the Selarnists who split off from the Morkensiks," retorted Jaldis, with a frown of anger and what would have been a deadly edge to his voice, had it been capable of anything except a sweet, buzzing monotone. "And the Oath was and always has been, to do no harm..."
"Be that as it may." The Selarnist's tone was clear: What is the point, it asked, of bandying words with a heretic? "We cannot, alas, deny you what you consider to be your right to 'make a living,' as you say; but we can deny you your freedom to do so in this town. Now, you are welcome to stay in our House for a time if poverty is a problem..."
"So that you can tell me what I can and cannot do?" Jaldis demanded. "So that you can sequester my books, and my crystals, and the implements of my art, in your own library, for the good of the magistrates of this town?" And Rhion saw Chelfrednig's eyes shift. "Thank you," the old man went on stiffly, "but we will earn our bread in some other fashion while we are here, and study as we please."
"I am afraid," Chelfrednig said, 'that that is not an option open to you either. The guilds in Imber are quite strict about wizards entering businesses or trades. Quite understandably, seeing how an unscrupulous mage - one not bound by proper rules - could take an unfair advantage of lesser men."
Hesitantly, the landlady said, "I'm sorry. But you see, I sell most of my greens to them, and milk..." Her bright, worried eyes went nervously from Jaldis' face to Rhion's, torn between her liking for them, her need for money, her sense of justice, and her fear that, as wizards, they would cause a scene of the kind she could barely guess at and draw down still more trouble upon her head.
"Right..." Rhion muttered furiously, and Jaldis placed a staying hand upon his shoulder from behind, and inclined his head.
"Very well," he said. "My good woman..." He turned his disconcertingly insectile gaze upon her, and she shrank back in spite of herself. "My sincerest apologies for the trouble we may have caused you, and..." With a very slight motion of his head he indicated the two Selarnists, "...my apologies to you on behalf of all wizardry, that these persons considered it incumbent upon themselves to interfere in your life." He turned to face Chelfrednig fully. "We shall be gone by sunset. Is that sufficient?"
"Noon would be better," the old woman with the ash staff said, speaking for the first time, "if you want to come to shelter before night."
"That," replied Jaldis chillingly, "is our business. I bid you good day."
They were on the road again by noon. "The nerve of them!" Rhion fumed, picking his way cautiously along the most solidly frozen and least cut-up side of the main highroad that led from Imber south through the hills toward the steep-sided Valley of the Morne, and so on to the Mountains of the Sun, and to Nerriok beyond. "I mean, it's not like we were Hand-Prickers or Earth-witches selling cut-rate horoscopes and conversations with your dead ancestors on the street corners, you know! We're Morkensiks! We were the original founding line of wizardry... !" His foot slipped where a cartwheel earlier in the day had sliced through the snow and into the frozen clay beneath. He caught himself on the walking staff he'd cut, and put out a hand to guide Jaldis around the place.
Beyond the brown hedges and drainage cuts that hemmed in the road the fields lay empty under the silence of winter. Even this short a distance from the town walls the hedges were overgrown, the ditches silting up, and sedges prickling thick and black through the blanket of dirty snow. The road itself was narrow and unkept; for a long time the township of Imber had been disregarding the corvee laws of its titular liege, the Earl of Way. At least, thought Rhion, hunching deeper into the hood of his cloak and scanning the deserted and overgrown fields nervously, if they were attacked by bandits out here, or in the stony hills or the wilderness of the Drowned Lands that lay beyond, they had the option of fighting back without concern about future retaliation against wizardry in general.
To most people, he knew, a wizard was a wizard was a wizard - as had been the case with himself before he'd become Jaldis' pupil - a mysterious figure in a long robe who acted from unknown motives and held strange and dangerous powers. And from that standpoint, he supposed, Chelfrednig's argument was correct: his sale of potions would contradict what the Selarnists had been laboriously working to convince the town authorities was the nature of wizardry. Though it was only their opinion of what it should be, dammit! And thus, though he and Jaldis could have summoned lightning from the sky to blast Lord Pruul's liverymen and their volunteer helpers out of existence, or even have caused the stairs at the Black Pig to collapse under their weight long enough to have given them time to make a getaway, in the long run it would mean more trouble for other wizards they knew, who would have suffered the retaliation.
It was, in fact, the reason that Jaldis had left the house where he had lived for so many years in Nerriok - that tall, narrow house on one of the dozen tiny islands that made up the city, where Rhion had first learned the nature of magic and had first seen what it was to be a mage. When the old High King had died and his brother had briefly taken the scepter, the brother had hated wizards due to some bad financial dealings with an Ebiatic mage who, in Rhion's opinion, should have known better. As a result all mages, from respected masters of the Great Art like Jaldis down to the Figure-Flingers throwing painted bones on the street corners, had been banished from the city and the realm, to earn what livings they could in places like the Black Pig.
The old High King's brother had died at the turning of autumn, of dysentery contracted while besieging the stronghold of a rebellious vassal in the Clogreth Hills in the west. On the night of the winter solstice, even as Jaldis had been listening in the Dark Well to the clamor of voices crying of the death of magic, the High King's daughter had been crowned in the great Temple of Darova in Nerriok, and had received the homage of all the lords of the Forty Civilized Realms.
It was, Jaldis had said quietly, time to return home.
Night fell early. Owing to the rucked and muddy condition of the winter roads and to Jaldis' lameness, the two wizards were far from the inn which even in summertime lay a good day's journey from Imber's gates. They pressed on long after it grew fully dark. Throughout the day the cloud cover had been thinning under the creeping dryness of the north wind; rags of moonlight filtering through the bare trees which pressed ever more closely about the road through the hills eventually showed Rhion the inn itself, perched on a little rise where the road up from the Drowned Lands divided to run northwards to Imber, and to Felsplex in the east.
Snow lay heavy on the bare hilltops above the road and among the trees that grew thick as a bear pelt about their feet. Against its luminous pallor, the inn's gray stone walls bulked heavy and dark. Every shutter was fastened, every door bolted; every stall in the snow-blanketed stable yard was empty and smelled of fox-mess and field mice, and the tracks of deer and rabbits were a scribbled message all about the walls: Not at Home.
Rhion swore fluently for a short while, then walked with what caution he could muster - a city boy born and raised, he had little woodcraft - all around the inn and its outbuildings, sniffing, listening, searching with the hyper-acute senses of a wizard for the least sign of danger. But all he heard was the scurrying of mice across bare wooden floors, and the chewing of beetles in the walls. Coming nearer, he found some evidence that a small troop of horses - maybe the mounts of bandits - had occupied the stables a week or so ago, but had been gone before the fall of the snow. No smoke curled from the chimneys, no track broke the snow crust around the woodpile outside the kitchen door.
"There was sickness, I think," Jaldis said sometime later, pressing his hands to the stones of the chimney breast in the dark and deserted common room. "It is hard to read. So many griefs and joys, so much talk and laughter have seeped their way into the stones here. But I feel most recently bad news from somewhere, early in the autumn... fresh apples. They had just picked the apples, the smell of them was strong in the room. Ullana... Ullata... some name like that. Ullata is sick, they said."
He shook his head, the white strands floating around his thin face rimmed with the new-coined brightness of the fire Rhion had kindled in the hearth. The warm light turned the rosewood voice-box the color of claret, and flickered in the talismans that hung from it, dancing chips of green and gold and red. He had put his spectacles away, and wore instead, as he frequently did when he went abroad, a linen bandage over the collapsed and sunken lids of his empty eyes.
"Ullata is sick... and so we have to go."
Rhion looked up from adjusting massive iron firedogs meant to uphold wood enough to heat the enormous room. "Maybe Ullata was going to leave them some money." Behind the blaze, tiny in the midst of all that acreage of blackened hearth bricks, a torture chamber ensemble of spits, hooks, and pot-chains loured in the shadows of the huge chimney. "At least Ullata didn't get sick before they cut the winter's wood."
Nevertheless, when he straightened up again he placed his own hands to the stone of the overmantle, and sent his mind feeling its way through the tight-crossed, gritty fibers of the granite, touching the voices, the images, and the fragments of other days which permeated the stone. The inn had stood for hundreds of years: he glimpsed a red-haired woman washing a new-born baby on the hearth and weeping bitterly, silently, as she worked; saw a young man sitting with his back to the iron firedogs, every window open into the heart-shaking magic of summer evening, greedily reading a scroll stretched between his up-cocked knees; saw an old man shelling peas and talking to a blond-haired child whose brown eyes were filled with a hungry wonder and the shadows of strange destinies. But he had not Jaldis' fineness of perception. He could not separate ancient from recent - all these people might well have been dead for centuries - nor could he make out words. Only the smells of smoke and beer and roasting meats came to him, the echoes of bawdy songs and the clink of the little iron tavern puzzles that hung silent now in a neat row from spikes driven into the chimney's stones.
The widow woman had given them bread and cheese for the journey, as well as most of Rhion's money back; there were yams, dried beans, and sweet dried apples from the trees along the inn's west wall to be found in the cellar. After a meal of these, while Jaldis sat with his opal spectacles on his nose and his scrying-crystal - a chunk of spell-woven quartz the color of bitterroot tea - between his palms, Rhion put on his cloak once more and left the inn to make another circuit of it and draw wizard's marks upon the surrounding trees.
As he came back across the moonlit stillness of the yard, he noticed a gleam like a fleck of quicksilver near the door-handle, and, looking more closely, saw that a silver nail had been driven into the heavy oak. Thoughtfully, he picked his way over the slippery drifts to the nearest of the shuttered windows. Silver nails had been driven into the sills of them all - tiny, almost like pinheads, for the metal was expensive. The inn's protection had doubtless owed more to its roaring fires and the lamps in their iron sconces which had ringed the yard and to the noise of its customers and the smells of their massed bodies and blood. But standing in the snow that lay glittering like marble all around the inn, listening to the forest silence pressing so close about its walls, Rhion remembered that in waste places at night there were more things to be feared than human prejudice and human spite.
He hated the thought of risking the only thing that stood between him and starvation. Nevertheless, he swept the crusted snow from the bench beside the door, and sat on it to draw from his pocket the little velvet bag of coins. There were seven or eight silver royals among the copper. Minted in Felsplex, he reflected dourly, biting one. God knows if it's even as pure as it's stamped. His father, one of the wealthiest bankers in the City of Circles, had always held the Felsplex municipal council's fiscal policies in utter contempt, and having seen them at medium-close range for two and a half years now Rhion couldn't blame him. However, it was all the silver they had, even if it was less pure than the buttons of some doublets Rhion had worn back when he was still his father's son.
"Alas for lost opportunities," he sighed to himself, and went to work laying small words of Ward on each silver coin. Then he buried them in the snow - with suitable, and invisible, marks over each so he could find them in the morning - in a loose ring around the inn, and drew a tenuous thread of spells from coin to coin, forming the protection of a Circle of Silver.
And thus it was that in the dead of night he was awakened by the chittering whisper of attacking grims.