His skin pricked. “Yes, but…”
“Asking questions about you would be akin to reading your mind.” She nodded. “We won’t talk about you at all. She sounds far more interesting.”
Pushing aside his reluctance, he rose and sat beside her on the boulder, then drew the satchel out from under his shirt. He removed Vella and opened her so that Yira could see the pages.
Try not to betray me, he thought.
“Hmm,” Yira said. “Well, then. Hello, Vella.”
Hello, Yira, appeared on the page.
Yira drew in a quick breath. “That’s amazing!” She chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “So what do you know that doesn’t involve Tyen?”
A great deal.
Yira laughed. “I’m sure there’s plenty he doesn’t need or want to know. Unless… is there knowledge in you that he needs to know?”
Tyen’s heart skipped. Yira was only being helpful, but if the information was related to his deal with the Raen…
Not yet.
“Not yet?” Yira glanced at Tyen. “Give me an example?”
When he is older he will need to learn to stop ageing.
Yira spluttered. “You know how to cheat death?”
Yes.
“And Tyen hasn’t bothered to learn it yet?”
No.
She turned to stare at him. “Why not?”
He shrugged. “It takes a long time to learn–many cycles for some–and part of what it involves is… disturbing.”
“Like?”
“It changes you.”
“Of course it does. That’s the point.”
“But the point of stopping ageing is to stay as you are.”
“We’re all changing, all the time,” she reminded him. “Otherwise we couldn’t learn anything.” She paused. “Though I suppose you know that, so the changes have to be something more. Something worse.” She looked down at Vella. “Could I learn this?”
Yes, if you find a world so rich in magic that it boosts your strength sufficiently to achieve it, leaving enough magic for you to either stay and maintain agelessness or leave the world again.
“Are there worlds that strong?”
I have never heard of one strong enough to turn a sorcerer of moderate strength into an ageless sorcerer.
Yira’s shoulders slumped. “And my powers are not even strong enough to be called ‘moderate’. Well, that’s a disappointment I wasn’t expecting today.” She looked at Tyen, somewhat accusingly. “You are going to do it one day, right?”
He nodded. “Probably.”
She reached out to touch the book, then thought better of it. “It was an honour to meet you, Vella. I hope we can speak again. I know I’ll think of more questions to ask you, and none of them about Tyen.”
I look forward to it.
Yira chuckled. “Put her back in her bag,” she instructed. As he did so she stood up and looked around the ravine, but her gaze was distracted.
“The temple city of Aei,” she said quietly. “That’s where I’m thinking of setting up our new base.”
Tyen nodded, though she was not looking at him. “Plenty of traffic from other worlds. Lots of people to be lost among. It is a good location, if people are still visiting there.”
She smiled. “Oh, they will be. Tens of thousands of pilgrims will be determined to get there, no matter what the cost. Unlike merchants, they won’t be so easily dissuaded from travelling between worlds.” She looked back at him. “And he may not want to stop them. Aei is the Raen. The religion started when he first began meddling in the affairs of worlds. The Travellers know, and the founders of Liftre confirmed it through their studies of old texts and such.”
He frowned. “But doesn’t that mean he’ll visit it frequently?”
“Oh, he’s not appeared in the temple for over a hundred cycles.” She shrugged. “That’s far less than most worlds. I used to know a priest of the order, who said they wished their god would visit more often. I suspect he avoids the place so he isn’t bombarded with requests.”
Tyen shook his head. “I’m going to have to seek out the Travellers one day. They seem to know a lot, and influence everything. The language we speak, the paths through worlds…”
She smiled. “I’m sure you will run into them one day. But right now, we need to make over a hundred clues that will disappear once they’re read, and deliver them to the locations the messages in Grenwald will send the rebels to. And we need to decide where in the temple city of Aei those clues will send them to.”
He stood up. “Then we’d better get to work.”
CHAPTER 9
The new rebel base couldn’t be any more different to the last, Tyen reflected as he padded, barefoot, over the elegant wooden bridge. Two rebels accompanied him, one chatting, the other following quietly. They were from the same world, but different lands, and while Joi was tall and broad-shouldered and Gevalen short and slight, both had slightly greenish-brown skin covered in fine hairs.