At last Titirga saw him below, and the Diurnal answered his sudden attention. Shae?nanra could no more look at the man than he could look into the sun. He raised his arms like a slave in summer fields, and for the first time he witnessed the magic of the Diurnal from the inside. Blue skies had been pulled across the void of night. His skin pricked with the promise of sunburn. It was a sight so miraculous as to almost blot the Stain, the premonition of deceit that marred all things sorcerous.
He watched the false sun set in the false sky, then stop, low and bloody as sunset, throwing shadows outward along lines the Nonmen could describe in arithmetic. Titirga had set the Day Lantern down, he realized. The Hero-Mage would deny the advantages that night bestows upon cunning …
No matter.
The shadow of the walking Archideme reached Shae?nanra long before the man.
“The Diurnal,” Titirga called, still a silhouette in the sun’s cauldron. “Emilidis gave it to me.”4
“Archideme,” Shae?nanra said in numb greeting.
“Shae?nanra,” Titirga replied, coming to a stop mere paces from him. He was tall, broad of shoulder. He wore a Pircondi cloak over his black woolen robes, two wolf-skins sewn together, so that the tailings of the face fluttered side-by-side below his groin. His hair was white, spun with the odd memory of gold. It matched his physique, holding something of its cascading form even in the Wind. But it was his high blunt face that commanded attention: shallow of nose, thick of brow and cheek.
And of course the bronzed skull of an infant child braided into his beard—his famed totem.
“Archideme,” Shae?nanra repeated, offering the ritual repetition, at once a rebuke and reprieve: to refer to equals by name before formal greetings was an affront among the Umeri. Had the Archidemu Sohoncu at last adopted the crude ways of the Cond?
“You look pale” Titirga said. “It is good that I bring sunlight.”
Shae?nanra snorted.
“You Mangaecca,” the Hero-Mage continued, “always thinking that Wisdom is a mushroom. The Ground is so broad, and yet you and your brothers insist on digging deep.”
A sour look.
“Nogaral greets you … Archideme.”
Titirga walked about him as if pacing the high corner of a circle. He carried himself as only a master of the Sohonc, the Learned School,5 could: erect in the manner of nimble, sound-sleeping men, relaxed in the way of high clan-nobility. He gestured to the marmoreal wreckage about them, the stumps of pillars struck in arrested daylight.
“The ruins of Viri.”
“The very same,” Shae?nanra replied.
“A lesson,” Titirga said, “to those who would dig too deep.”
Shae?nanra sighed conspicuously. “To what do I owe the honour of this visit?” he asked, gesturing for Titirga to enter his vast abode.
“Whispers,” Titirga responded, drawing his gaze about him before stepping into the shadow of Nogaral’s gate. He was making an inventory, Shae?nanra knew, of all the Wards coiled within the stonework about him.
Nothing that could threaten him—certainly.
Casting a final glance at the impossible dusk, Shae?nanra strode forward, baring his back the way the laws of hospitality demanded. He fairly cracked his teeth for apprehension.
He passed beneath the enormous lintel, into the warmth of plastered walls. The Wind’s roar was pinched into a chalky whistle. A step ahead of the Hero-Mage, Shae?nanra walked on a bolt of sunlight so bright that, for the first several paces, the braziers were filled with wavering invisibility for fire.
“Whispers brought you here?”
“Aye,” the man said from behind. “They say that you have found something.”
Had he not known Titirga, Shae?nanra would have thought him a rank fool, coming here like this, alone. But he knew Titirga’s might, and more importantly, he knew the way the man used hectoring boldness to magnify that might. To come here like this was to say he could arrive at any time …
And that he possessed no fear.
Shae?nanra paused and turned, regarded his old rival. The man had a warrior’s face, chipped from fearless bone, everything blunt in the way of shields. “What does it matter what we find?” he said. “The Ark is a riddle without solution.”
The first hard moment passed between them.
“Who,” the Archidemu Sohoncu replied, “can say which riddles can or cannot be solved beforehand?”
He gazes past the mad Nonman, to the second Horn, vast and golden, its phallic curve canted over the mountainous ruin of the Occlusion.
“None possessed my cunning.”
Cet’ingira lowers his chin to his chest.
“We shall see.”
“Come,” Shae?nanra said. “Loose your gaze. See. You will understand what I mean.”
He resumed leading Titirga down the main reception hall, “winding the small,” as the Nonmen put it, affecting careless questions about the affairs of the All. “Do they still riot in Sauglish?”6
“The Library is secure,” the Sohonc Insinger7 said in clipped dismissal. “And yet, I see Nogaral is all but abandoned …” he added in an airy, peering-around-corners tone. “Just as they say.”
The Archideme of the Mangaecca resisted looking back, knowing the Hero-Mage smiled.
“Who says?”
At last they outran the final vestiges of the Day Lantern. Their shadows now jumped in counterpoint, sweeping like spiders’ legs as they approached and passed each of the corridor’s flaming braziers.
“Your spies, Shae?nanra.”
The Archidemu Mangaeccu managed to stifle his laughter. They walked the remainder of the corridor in silence. Despite his worry, Shae?nanra had occasion to feel shame for the mean and brutish nature of his abode, for in spite of everything, he had been raised an Umeri of the Long-bones, the same as Titirga. He knew the askance judgments, the summary ease of the man’s condemnation: Only dogs dwelt in kennels.
But what did it matter, this false home, when their true abode would drop any mortal to his knees? The Ark. They could stack a hundred Libraries within it … A thousand!
At last they entered the broad circle of the Asinna, the expansive hub of Nogaral. A great rug woven of brushed white grasses softened both the floor and the gloom. Bronze tripods glowered golden, casting yellow petals across the weave. Tablet racks fashioned of black ash loomed about the chamber’s circumference. Shae?nanra stifled a grin of duping glee, knowing that a stylus had never touched any of them.
He walked toward the lone attendant—a near-naked Scintian slave—who awaited them with refreshment near the centre. He paused and turned when he realized that Titirga had failed to follow him.
“There is someone beneath me,” the Hero-Mage said scowling. “Someone deeply Stained.”
Shae?nanra paused … nodded. “A precaution, nothing more. It is of no consequence.”
Wrath flashed in Titirga’s eyes. “Nevertheless, there remains someone beneath me. Someone hooded in our shared sin.”
They gazed at each other with the flat hostility of lizards. Shae?nanra found himself shirking first, if only to hasten the pantomime—or so he reassured himself. Even still, he could feel the prickle of stink beneath his robes. The ache of expectation in his throat.
“Must I take precautions of my own?” Titirga asked, his voice as mild as blades in water.
The Archidemu Mangaeccu made as if his throat required clearing. “I apologize. He will withdraw.”
This earned a heartbeat of avid scrutiny.