CXLIII
Cerryl studied the empty Avenue, his eyes flicking around the square. Despite the infrequent street lamps, the whitened granite of the Avenue held and reflected enough light, even at midnight, that Cerryl’s borrowed mount had no difficulty in making her way from the Artisans’ Square up the narrower Way of the Lesser Artisans. The shops of the first crafters were as he had recalled, including the old potter’s, but the one that had held the weaver’s shop-where he had first seen Pattera- that now held yet another potter, if the emblem over the door were true.
He guided the mare down the alleyway-past all the sewer catches- toward the rear gate to Tellis’s house. Outside the courtyard, Cerryl sat in the saddle, then fingered the leather pouch-a small handful of golds, but a few golds were all he had. Not all by any means, but you have other debts to pay, and now is not when you should be poor again, either. Self-deception? Probably.
He smiled in the darkness, not quite sardonically, as he swung down from his mount, which he tied to the gate. He looked in all directions, but all the nearby windows were dark. Then, letting the light-blurring shield rise around him, he opened the gate from the alley and eased across the rear courtyard. Rather than open the common room door, Cerryl tied the pouch to the door latch and cloaked it in a faint illusion, one that would break the moment a hand touched the latch and one that would not hold past midmorning.
He wondered if Tellis and Beryal or Benthann would guess who had left the pouch. One way or another, it didn’t matter. Another debt paid… as best you can for now.
He retreated to the gate, which he closed, and then untied the mare and remounted. The faint clop of hoofs echoed down the alley and then along the Way of the Lesser Artisans as he retraced his path back to the small stable behind Layel’s small mansion. The air remained warm and still, the Avenue empty, except for one White mage and his mount.
Once back at the stable, he dismounted and led the mare to her stall. He brushed her quickly in the darkness, then closed her stall and the stable door, making his way through the gloom back to the door on the south side of the house. He unlocked it with Leyladin’s key, then relocked it behind himself. His steps were not quite noiseless on the marble floor, but no one roused-or called out-as he opened Leyladin’s bedchamber door, then closed it behind him.
“You weren’t that long. How did it go?” asked Leyladin sleepily as he undressed and then slipped under the single sheet, more than enough for the warm night.
“It was too little and too late, but…”
“Better than not at all.” She touched his lips with her finger. “Tellis? The weaver girl?”
“Tellis. The weaver has moved.”
“I’ll ask Soaris to see if he can find her. No one should know you’re the one who’s looking. Especially Anya.”
Especially Anya. “Thank you.”
“I’m glad you are who you are.” Two warm arms slipped around him, and their lips met.
So am I… after all these years.
CXLIV
Sitting at the other side of the round table, the gaunt Kinowin sipped some early cider from a mug.
Just like Myral. Does age do that? Cerryl’s eyes lingered on the mug.
“The apple juice helps.” Kinowin smiled. “I used to wonder that myself. Now, I know. What more about the smith?”
“He is building a town. I wasn’t sure to begin with,” Cerryl admitted, “but in two eight-days he has the beginning of another port town. The Blacks are letting him do it; some are even sending timber and supplies”
“Maybe it’s just a way to get a second good port,” suggested the overmage, fingering the collar starburst with the fingers of his free hand. “The waters are smoother in the winter there.”
“They’ve even got a timber wharf, and the glass shows walls and footings for a stone quay or something. He’s working on the bay, making it bigger, but with some kind of order force.”
“You can’t use order that way,” Kinowin pointed out.
“He used some kind of order force to kill Jeslek,” Cerryl countered.
“Are you sure he just didn’t use order to contain that force?”
Cerryl shrugged. “That might be, but he’s as Black as they come, with no trace of chaos. How did he come up with that kind of force? Chaos is the only force I know of that’s so strong.”
Kinowin fingered his clean-shaven chin, his eyes going to the purple and blue hanging on the wall above him. “Cammabark or explosive powder, I’d guess, and he put it inside black iron so none of you could spark it off with chaos fire.”
“What if he builds something bigger than what he carried?”
The overmage offered a wan smile. “If he doesn’t, someone else will. That’s usually what happens.”
“He could use it against our lancers or-”
“That won’t work,” Kinowin replied. “He can only forge so much black iron. He couldn’t possibly forge enough to take on even a few companies of lancers. It has to be a limited weapon.” He laughed. “Good against mages and little else. This Dorrin didn’t remain in Diev. You’ll also note that Sterol avoided talking to you three about his weapon.”
“I wondered, but that’s not something you ask the High Wizard.” Cerryl laughed once, softly.
“Just watch to see if the smith is building something else. In the meantime, I will tell Sterol about the town and the new harbor,” Kinowin said. “Now that we’re sure. I only told him that the ship had been moved away from the part of Recluce, where there were towns. He laughed at that.”
“He won’t laugh now.”
“No. He’ll try to blame you. That’s why I won’t tell him until I’ve written a short scroll about it and given a copy to Redark and a few others.” Kinowin offered a wry grin. “It will be later this afternoon. We can’t afford to allow him to claim we delayed unduly.”
“Then what?”
“You give me a short written report each day-dated, you know, fiftieth day after the turn of spring… first day after the turn of summer.”
“What will that do? He’ll still want to blame me.”
“I’m sure he will. But he can’t, not with the reports. So he’ll send you somewhere, and it won’t be bad for you to be someplace else for a while.”
Cerryl wasn’t certain he wanted to be somewhere else. He hadn’t had that long with Leyladin, and here the overmage was suggesting they be separated again.
“Remember,” Kinowin said gently, “you wanted to be a White mage.”
The overmage’s words hung in Cerryl’s mind long after he had left the tower and was riding out to the south gate for another inspection.
You wanted to be a White mage…but did you have any real choices?
Yes… you just didn’t like any of the others.
CXLV
Cloaked in the light-blurring shield, the one that would not scream his presence to an alert gate mage, Cerryl stood in the early-afternoon shadow of the guardhouse beside the north gate.
Another of the younger mages he did not know paced along the upper balcony, looking down and out at the empty White highway that stretched north and then eastward to Lydiar. The gate mage rubbed her forehead, then her neck, before pacing back across the worn stone tiles, the same tiles Cerryl had paced in years past. It scarcely seemed that long ago, before Spidlar had become more than a name on a map and a wiry smith had killed the most powerful chaos mage in generations.
Cerryl focused his eyes on the gate mage, who had seated herself on a stool. Below her, the three duty guards stood in the shade of the gates, not a dozen paces from him.
“… slow…”
“… always slow anymore, except for the post coaches… some of the factors’ wagons…”
“Don’t see many wagons out of Certis or Gallos these days.”
“Hydolar, neither…”
Cerryl nodded to himself. As Layel and Leyladin had also noted, the roads were almost empty, except for farmers bringing produce to Fairhaven, and such slow commerce was unusual at any time, particularly in summer.
Then, there was the problem of the Black smith. Each day Cerryl screed the southern tip of Recluce. Each day he wrote a report, and each day more dwellings and structures were appearing in the smith’s town on Recluce. Kinowin had reported such to Sterol, but the High Wizard had done nothing-at least nothing that Kinowin had relayed or that Cerryl had perceived.
Nor had Cerryl found any more traces of Anya’s presence in his room in the Halls.
The quietness that filled the Halls of the Mages bothered Cerryl. Something had happened-or would happen. He just hadn’t been able to see what it was or might be.
His eyes went back to the gate mage. She had stood and begun to pace again-as he had so often.