The young man slipped through the dark Istarian alleys, his movements silent and veiled.
Twice he lurched into shadowy doorways, stand shy;ing breathlessly still until a squadron of soldiers rattled by on the moonlit street, Lunitari spangling their bronze armor with a blood-red light. Winding his way through the intricate streets of the city like a burglar, he passed the School of the Games.
Silently, anonymously, he continued past the Ban shy;quet Hall and the Welcoming Tower, once festive buildings now muted with night and the recent news of an Istarian defeat. He stepped into the moonlight here, and the red glow tumbled onto his dark skin, his green-gold eyes, the short, well-kept beard. His hair was cut in the dark roach of Istarian servitude-the topknot extending from nape to widow's peak. His wide mouth fell into a secret mocking smile.
They said Fordus had put it to the Kingpriest. Put it to him well in the grasslands to the south. Who shy;ever Fordus was.
Now those vaunted legions, decimated and lead-erless, camped by Istar's outer walls with their backs to the cold stone, their garbage piling up around them, had orders to defend the city at all costs.
It was ludicrous. They heard the march of rebels in the wind and confused the low stars on the northern horizon with a thousand rebel campfires on the plains. They saw Fordus's face under every lackey's hood.
Still, Istar was far from beaten. The army that this Fordus had crushed, though formidable, was not a tenth of the Kingpriest's power. Already the city echoed with new tidings, with the rumor of military movement in high places, of counterattack and reprisal.
When the young man was halfway across the Cen shy;tral Court, a third patrol approached-slowly, with a clatter of gruff voices and new, ill-fitting armor. The young man crawled catlike beneath a broken wagon abandoned not a hundred feet from the main entrance to the Great Temple. He held his breath again until the last of the soldiers passed, muting his thoughts in case a cleric traveled with them. When the courtyard was once again clear, he peered through the cracked spokes of the wagon wheel at the dome of the Great Temple glittering in moon shy;light, red as the helmets and breastplates of the patrolling soldiers.
As he watched, the bell in the lofty tower swayed and tolled the fourth hour since the turn of night- the last hour of darkness.
Vincus was somewhat early; the call to First Prayer was not for several minutes. He would have to wait until the clerics began their silent, ritual movement toward chamber and candlelit chapel. Then, when most of the residents' thoughts wool-gathered in peasant rite and pretty ceremony, he could cross the open courtyard undetected.
Vincus crawled up into the tilted bed of the wagon and, lying back in the sour straw, lifted and then settled his seamless silver collar so that it did not clank against the wood. The bright heavy circle was marked only by the common lettering of his name.
Vincus was a temple slave, and not a contented one.
For a year now, he had served as silent go-between in the usual tower intrigues, and in one case, he abetted the out.-and-out treason of an eccentric, superstitious priest from the west-a man strangely attuned to weather and seasons and growing things, more pleasant to him than any of those mush-faced, white-robed sycophants.
But in the end, all sides were the same to Vincus. All sides but his own. Daily, patiently, he awaited an opportunity either to steal enough to pay off his father's debts or somehow to break the silver collar, the sign of Temple slavery that neither smith nor armorer would dare loosen. If he were free of that collar, he could flee into the city shadows, let his hair grow back and lose himself among the narrow side streets and alleys and winding sewers he knew so well.
His chance would come. Not tonight, but soon, he knew.
Meanwhile, this hiding place was odorous, but at least it was comfortable. He had waited in far worse surroundings: in the dark rat-infested cellar of an ale-house, in the cobwebbed rafters of a foul-smelling tannery, once even neck-deep in oily har shy;bor water, clinging for his life to the treacherously barnacled side of a moored ship.
The ship had been the worst, for Vincus was no swimmer, and the barnacles had cut and savaged his hands.
With that memory in mind, the wagon bed seemed suddenly more than sufficient.
Scarcely an hour from now, while the clergy droned and murmured in the first foolish rite of the day and the hard-hatted soldiers drowsed at their assigned guard posts, he could cross the courtyard virtually unnoticed. Slipping from shadow to shadow, he could scale the outer wall, stroll through the garden to the braided green silk rope dangling from the high window that would be left open for him, and there, in the shadow of vallenwood branches, scramble up the tower wall like a burglar.
For wasn't that what he was? A thief of secret thoughts?
Vincus laughed silently and closed his eyes, rustling into the soft, makeshift mattress. He could drowse now, for his days on the streets of Istar had taught him to sleep with a strange vigilance. Soft sounds three blocks away tumbled like dreams through the edge of his senses, and Vincus took note of each of them: the low chuckling of a pigeon stir shy;ring in sleep, the scuttling of a rat amid the offal in an alley.
The sound of a dagger drawn from a gilded sheath.
Instantly, Vincus's golden eyes popped open. His right hand slowly reached to a fold in his tunic, where he kept his homemade leather sling and six stones. Once again motionless, assured his weapon was there, he turned his head with agonizing slow shy;ness to the slit in the wagon's side, where the boards had long ago shrunk and parted. From there he watched the mouths of the alleys, listening for metal on metal again, for a clue to the sound's direction in the directionless dark.
He fought down his fearful imaginings. Perhaps it was another patrol, this time with dogs or Irda or minotaur. Or a ghost. After all, the city was said to be deep with the roving dead.
Maybe an evil god, set on a cruel and arbitrary hunt. Hiddukel of the broken scales. Chemosh of the undead, his yellowed skull agleam in torchlight.
Vincus closed his eyes, banished all the fears. Had the kindly Vaananen not taught him that such gods could not prosper against him?
Kick them in the backside, I will, he thought. And send them packing to the Abyss.
You are safe, Vincus, he reminded himself. You have not come this far to be abandoned. Your chance will come.
Finally, he heard the dagger replaced, the sound scarcely in range and nearly lost in the clatter of hoofbeats from a passing rider.
Traveling away, Vincus thought. Whoever it is. Traveling toward the School of the Games.
He relaxed, staring past the foul straw up into the city sky. Faintly, through the ash and smoke and torchlight, he caught a glimmer of stars in the north shy;ern sky. Bright Sirrion floated through the constel shy;lated harp of Branchala, as though the old planet played accompaniment to this sly nocturnal busi shy;ness.
It was curious tidings Vincus had gathered tonight for Vaananen at the Temple. Dissent in the ranks. First threat to the rebels. Try as he might-and Vin shy;cus was shrewd and inventive-he could not piece together a story out of the fragments he had heard. An Istarian mercenary captain, an augurer, and a seller of salt in the Marketplace-three conversa shy;tions had spawned three versions of a rumor. Each story seemed somehow linked with the others, shar shy;ing a common substance like the facets of a crystal, but again like facets, each shed diverging and frac shy;tured truth.
But it was not Vincus's job to piece together the evidence. Calmly and silently he waited to deliver it, while the fiery old planet passed through the starry harp and the last hour of the night turned into the first of the morning.
The tower bells tolled that first hour, and the city of Istar wakened slowly in the early morning dark shy;ness.
In the corridors of the great marble temple, dozens of white-robed figures filed down the shining steps from the Outer Tower toward the Sacred Chamber, the underground sanctuary in which the Kingpriest and the principal clerics of Istar greeted every new day with First Prayer. The torches that lined the stairwell and the corridors smoked and sputtered, and among the clergy were many who nodded or shuffled sleepily, wrested from hard sleep and com shy;fortable beds by ritual demand.
At other places in the temple and in the city, more clergy gathered in similar ceremony, but those in the Sacred Chamber were the chosen, the elite whose service to Istar had spanned years, decades-in some cases, even the reigns of several Kingpriests.
At an hour more daylit or in a place less secure, the guards might have counted the white robes that entered the chamber that morning. Had they done so, they would have found that four of the number were missing, and that the infirmaries of the temple accounted for only three of the absent clergy.
But the hour was early, the guards as drowsy as the celebrants. The bronze-armored sentries nodded and blinked and closed the doors to the chamber at the appointed time, never knowing that one whose presence was expected-the cleric Vaananen of Near Qualinesti-had chosen not to attend the morning's ceremonies.
Instead, Brother Vaananen remained in his medi shy;tation chamber, stirring the fine white sand in his rena garden.
Vaananen was a westerner, and therefore seemed quite austere to some of the others in the brother shy;hood-mainly the Istarians who were spoiled by the city's soft ways and easy living. He was a tall, spare man, with long black-and-silver hair, which he kept clubbed neatly at his neck. His eyes were moss green and seemed to fill his entire face.
Vaananen smiled frequently, but always in secret, under his ample hood. He was a disguised druid working among the clerics, a man whose solitary pursuits made for few friends.
All the better.
His druidic masters had set him in Istar with the purpose of salvaging any ancient texts from the Kingpriest's destructive edicts. Secretly, painstak shy;ingly, Vaananen copied what he could find, translat shy;ing from rune and glyph into the common alphabet, and smuggling the new-made books out by silent courier and under other covers and titles.
Of late, he had found new things to do as well.
Vaananen's chamber was sparely and beautifully appointed: a small carved cot, a handmade teak table and copy desk, an exquisite stained glass lamp, and the rena garden-a simple, ten-foot-square recession in the floor, filled with sharp-grained white sand and punctuated with cacti and three large but movable stones, each of which represented one of the moons.
The secret of the garden was an old sylvan magic, perfected among the elves who, in the Age of Dreams, brought the sand into the forest to build the first of the renas. These elves had also known the true meaning of the stones: that the black stone was
augury, foretelling with the fractured, fitful light of divination, while the red stone told the past, its vision warped by the many versions of history. The white stone showed the present, showed what was happening someplace, usually unknown, a hundred feet or a thousand miles from the reader.
Moving slowly, carefully over the bright sand, Vaananen stirred circles with one foot. He bent, hoisted the red stone, and set it beside the white. Then, seating himself on the black stone, he stared across the broken expanse of sand, reading the fresh geometry of dune and ripple, the violet shadows cast by the stones.
The rena garden was now only a relaxation tool among the human clergy of Qualinesti. Absorbed and tamed into the Istarian theocracy, it was little more than a sedative, its true ancient powers forgotten. Now the sand and the abstract positioning of the stones were supposed to calm the mind for contem shy;plation, create a serenity in much the same way as, say, growing flowers or watching a waterfall.