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‘Not those currents. The other ones. The ones of power. Dark. Kurald Galain. What bleeds from that pattern in the floor in the outer room by the front doors.’ He lifted a small hand towards the mouthpiece she held, and delicately prised it from her grip. Angling the end upward, he watched as smoke curled free.
She waited for him to try it. She waited for his expression of shock, and then his coughing. She waited, she realized with a faint shock, for some company.
Instead, Lanear’s eyes widened as the swirl of smoke thickened, stretched out, making a sinuous dance as it found a serpentine form. The smoke then swung a viper’s head towards her, hovering opposite her face. She saw darkness where its eyes should have been, as liquid as Orfantal’s own.
‘Who,’ she asked in a faint gasp, ‘who stares at me from those eyes, Orfantal?’
‘Just me.’
The snake of smoke then withdrew, as if drawn back through the mouthpiece. In moments it was gone.
Smiling, Orfantal handed the mouthpiece back to her. ‘Cedorpul is collecting mages.’
Blinking, she focused on him once again. ‘Is he?’
‘He wants everyone to work on sorcery that breaks things, or hurts people. He says we need that, because the Liosan have it, and to stop them using it on us, we have to use it on them first.’
Lanear leaned back. She drew again on the pipe, but this time the smoke felt almost solid as it slithered down into her lungs. Startled, she looked down at Orfantal, but the boy was staring at something at the side of the chamber. She sent a stream of white towards the ceiling, and then said, ‘Orfantal, what do you think of Cedorpul’s reasoning?’
The boy frowned. ‘Is that what it is?’
‘He anticipates a battle, doesn’t he? Between magicks.’
‘Gallan says that darkness can only retreat. But then he says that retreating is the only way to win, because sooner or later the light passes, and what flows in behind it? Darkness. Gallan says Light’s victory is mortal, but Dark’s victory is eternal.’
‘I did not think,’ ventured Lanear as she studied this strange young boy, ‘Gallan had much time for children.’
‘No, but he liked my pet.’
‘Your dog?’
Orfantal rose. ‘No, not Ribs. My other pet. Ribs isn’t mine, but maybe,’ he added, moving towards a side door – the one he had been looking at earlier, ‘I’m his.’
He opened the door, and she saw now the dog, Ribs, lying as if about to pounce in the side passage, the pillow still in its mouth.
Orfantal rushed forward.
Spinning round, Ribs fled up the passage.
The boy followed, his bare feet light upon the floor, as if borne on feathers.
She heard the chase, dwindling away, until all was silent once more.
Careful, boy. Now you’re playing Gallan’s game.
Rustleaf offered none of the escape that came with d’bayang. Instead, it but enlivened the brain. For this moment’s repast, she’d chosen wrongly. And the loss of … company … left her feeling bereft.
* * *
Endest Silann set out from the Citadel, in search of decency. Crossing the two bridges, he made his way into the city, where the cold had drawn most people indoors. The snow had retreated to places less travelled, up against walls and in alleys where the white smears were dusted with grey soot. He moved between high estate walls, passing barred gates of iron and wood. Where the street ascended the bank, away from the river and above the floodplain, the estates burgeoned in size, and many of the long walls bore niches in which stood old statues, the marble figures painted in lifelike colours, with oversized eyes in each face offering a dispassionate regard to the cloaked man shuffling past.
In more ways than he deemed healthy, Endest preferred their blank stares over the intensity that plagued him in the Citadel. Followers stalked him now, fixing upon his every gesture with febrile attention, leaning into his every word, his every passing comment. He had met the need for a prophet with denial, and, when that failed, with silence. But this did little more than intensify their regard, crowding with imagined significance all that he did.
Any catalogue of mortal deeds could only assemble a list of flaws. Perfection belonged to the dead, where in the act of passing from what the senses could observe to what the memory reinvented, any fool could ascend into legend. But Endest Silann was not yet dead, not yet freed from mortal constraints. Sooner or later, prophets returned to their god, only to slip beyond and away, sliding their cold flesh into apocrypha – holy texts and blessed scrolls – and this was an impatient passage for the would-be witnesses waiting in the wings. He felt that he was already outliving his usefulness, and those who would pontificate and interpret his life would rather that life ended soon, if only to get him out of the way.
He walked towards the Winter Market grounds, and thirty paces behind him, as they had done since the Citadel, a score or more priests tracked him. They would do better with Cedorpul, but for all the manifestations of magic his old friend now commanded, there was nothing sacred in curious games with smoke and shadows, and even darkness made to flow like blood left no trail on the stones.
That gift, it seemed, belonged to Endest Silann alone.
