The game wasn’t going well. The pieces were spread out before Dorian like armies. Except that they weren’t like armies; they were armies, though in this game, few of the soldiers wore uniforms. Even those who did moved with reluctance. The Fool King shamed the Commander. The Reluctant King was kneeling somewhere at this moment. The Mage in Secret’s secret had split him from the King Who Might Have Been. The Shadow that Walks and the Courtesan couldn’t decide which side they were on. The Rent Boy was moving fast, but too slow, too slow. The Prince of Rats had marshaled his vermin, and they would rise from the Warrens, a tide of human filth. Even the Rogue Prince and the Blacksmith might play a part, if….
Blast! It was hard enough, just envisioning the pieces as they were. From there, he could often focus on one piece and see the choices it faced: the Commander as a drunk king shouted in his face, the Shadow that Walks as he faced the Apprentice in a honeymoon chamber. But just as he was fixing the pieces in space, setting their relative positions, he’d start seeing one or more at a different time. Seeing where the Blacksmith would be in seventeen years, stooped over a forge, urging his son back to work, didn’t do him any good in figuring out how to keep Feir alive until that day.
He went back to work. Now where was the Kidnapped?
Sometimes he felt as if he were but a breath of wind over the field of battle. He could see everything, but the most he could hope to do was blow one or two killing arrows off course. Where is that Mage in Secret? Ah.
“Open the door, quick,” Dorian said.
Feir looked up from the little table where he was seated, dragging a whetstone across the face of his sword. They were in a little house they’d rented off Sidlin where Dorian said they would be left alone. Feir rose and opened the door.
A man was just disappearing past it, walking determinedly down the street. His hair and gait were familiar. He must have seen something out of the corner of his eye—of course, the blond mountain that was Feir was hard to miss—because he turned on his heel, his hand dropping to his sword.
“Feir?”
Feir looked almost as surprised as Solon was, so Dorian said, “Both of you, inside.”
They came in, Feir giving a customary grumble about how Dorian never told him anything, and Dorian just smiling. So much to see, so much to know. It was easy to miss things right under your nose.
“Dorian!” Solon said. He embraced his old friend. “I ought to wring your neck. Do you know how much trouble your little ‘Lord Gyre’ bit cost me?”
Dorian laughed. He knew. “Oh, my friend,” he said, holding onto Solon’s arms. “You did well.”
“You look well, too,” Feir said. “You were fat when you left. Look at you now. A decade of military service has done you right.”
Solon smiled, but the smile faded fast. “Dorian, seriously, I have to know. Did you mean that I needed to come serve Logan, or did you mean Regnus? I thought you’d said Lord Gyre and not Duke Gyre, but when I got here, there were two lords Gyre. Did I do the right thing?”
“Yes, yes. They both needed you, and you saved both of them several times. Some you know, some you don’t.” Perhaps the most important thing Solon had done was something he would never appreciate: he had encouraged Logan’s friendship with Kylar. “But I won’t lie to you. Keeping your secret was something I didn’t foresee. I thought you would have shared it years ago. Down most paths I see now, Regnus Gyre will lose his life.”
“I’m a coward,” Solon said.
“Pah,” Feir said. “You’re many things, Solon, but you’re not a coward.”
Dorian kept silent, and let his eyes speak empathy. He knew differently. Solon’s silence had been cowardice. Dozens of times he’d tried to speak, but he could never summon the courage to risk his friendship with Regnus Gyre. The worst of it was that Regnus would have understood and laughed about it, if he’d heard it from Solon’s own lips. But discovering deceit in a friend felt like betrayal to a man who’d had his fiancée sold out from under him to another man.
“Your powers have grown,” Solon said.
“Yes, he’s truly insufferable now,” Feir said.
“I’m surprised the brothers at Sho’cendi let you come here,” Solon said.
Dorian and Feir looked at each other.
“You left without permission?” Solon asked.
Silence.
“You left against their direct orders?”
“Worse,” Dorian said.
Feir barked a laugh that told Solon he’d been put into another plan of Dorian’s that he couldn’t believe.
“What did you do?” Solon asked.
“It belonged to us, really. We’re the ones who found it again. They didn’t have any right,” Dorian said.
“You didn’t.”
Dorian shrugged.
“Where is it?” Solon asked. From the bland looks on their faces, he knew. “You brought it here?!”
Feir walked to the little bed and threw back the blankets. Curoch lay sheathed on the bed. The scabbard was white leather, inlaid with gold Hyrillic script and capped with gold.
“That’s not the original scabbard, surely.”
“It’s work like this that makes me want to never be a sword smith,” Feir said. “The scabbard is the original. Woven thick with magic as fine as Gandian silk, and I think all that’s just to preserve the leather. It won’t stay dirty, won’t take a mark. The gold inlay is real, too. Pure gold. Hardened to where it would stand against iron or even steel. If I could figure out that technique alone, my heirs would be rich to the twelfth generation.”
“We’ve barely dared unsheathe the sword, and of course we haven’t tried to use it,” Dorian said.
“I should hope not,” Solon said. “Dorian, why would you bring it here? Have you seen something?”
He shook his head. “Artifacts of such power skew my vision. They themselves and the lusts they invoke are so intense that it fogs my sight.”
Suddenly, he was drifting again, but drifting was too gentle a word for it. His vision latched onto Solon and images streamed past him. Impossible visions. Solon against incredible odds. Solon as a white-haired old man, except not old, but—blast, the image disappeared before he could understand it. Solon Solon Solon. Solon dying. Solon killing. Solon on a storm-tossed ship. Solon saving Regnus from a wetboy. Solon killing the king. Solon dooming Cenaria. Solon propelling Dorian into Khalidor. A beautiful woman in a chamber of a hundred portraits of beautiful women. Jenine. Dorian’s heart lurched. Garoth Ursuul.
“Dorian? Dorian?” the voice was distant, but Dorian grabbed onto the sound and pulled himself back to it.
He shook himself, gasping as if emerging from a cold lake.
“It’s getting worse as you get stronger, isn’t it?” Solon asked.
“He trades his mind for the visions,” Feir said. “He won’t listen to me.”
“My sanity isn’t necessary for the work I must do,” Dorian said simply. “My visions are.” The dice were in his hand, not just two dice, a whole handful of dice, each with a dozen faces. How many twelves can I throw? He would be throwing blind; he could see that Solon already was thinking he should leave, that no matter how good it was to see his old friends, he had to try to save Regnus Gyre. But Dorian had a feeling. That was the damnable thing. Sometimes it was as logical as a sesch game. Sometimes it was just an itch.
“Anyway, where were we?” he asked, playing the oblivious seer. “Feir doesn’t have enough Talent to use Curoch. If he tried, he’d either burn or explode. No offense, friend, you have finer control than either of us. I could use it, but only safely as a meister; my mage powers probably aren’t strong enough. Of course using it with the vir would be a total disaster. I don’t even know what I’d do. Of us, Solon, you’re the only mage in the room, or the country for that matter, who could hope to even hold it without dying, though it would be a near thing. You’d die if you tried to use more than a fraction of its power. Hmm.” He gazed into space as if he were suddenly caught by another vision. The line was set.
“Surely you didn’t bring it all this way for nothing,” Solon said.
Set and sprung.
“No. We had to get it away from the brothers. It was our only chance. If we’d waited until after we returned, they would have known they couldn’t trust us. It would have been kept far from us.”
“Dorian, you still believe in that one God of yours, don’t you?” Solon asked.
“I think he sometimes confuses himself with Him,” Feir said. It was uncharacteristically bitter and it struck Dorian deeply. It hurt because it was deserved. He was doing it right now.
“Feir’s right,” Dorian said. “Solon, I was setting you up to take the sword. I shouldn’t treat you that way. You deserve better and I’m sorry.”
“Damn,” Solon said. “You knew I was thinking of taking it?”
Dorian nodded. “I don’t know if it’s the right thing or not. I didn’t know you’d walk in our door until a second before you did. With Curoch, everything gets twisted. If you use it, Khalidor may well take it from us. That would be a disaster far greater than losing your friend Regnus, or even losing this entire country.”
“The risk is unacceptable,” Feir said.
“What good does it do anyone if we don’t use it?” Solon said.
“It keeps it out of the hands of the Vürdmeisters!” Feir said. “That’s good enough. There’s only a handful of mages in the world who could hold Curoch without dying, and you know it. We also know that there are dozens of Vürdmeisters who could. With Curoch in their hands, what could stop them?”
“I have a feeling about this,” Dorian said. “Maybe the God is nudging me. I just think it’s right. I feel like it’s connected to the Guardian of Light.”
“I thought you’d given up on those old prophecies,” Solon said.
“If you take Curoch, the Guardian will be born in our lifetimes.” Even as Dorian said it, he knew it was true. “I’ve been living so long saying I had faith, but it isn’t really faith when you just do what you see, is it? I think the God wants us to take this crazy risk. I think he’ll bring good out of it.”
Feir threw up his hands. “Dorian, the God is always your out. You run into a wall rationally and you say the God is speaking to you. It’s ridiculous. If this one God of yours created everything like you say, he also gave us reason, right? Why the hell would he make us do something so irrational?”
“I’m right.”
“Dorian,” Solon said. “Can I really use it?”
“If you use it, everyone in fifty miles will know it. Maybe even the ungifted. You run all the normal risks of drawing too much power, but your upper limit is higher than its lowest threshold. Things are happening too fast for me to see much, but I’m going to tell you this, Solon. The invasion force was headed for Modai.” Until Kylar didn’t kill Durzo Blint. “So they were prepared for a different kind of war. The boats arrive tonight. They have sixty meisters.”
“Sixty! That’s more than some of our schools,” Feir said.
“There are at least three Vürdmeisters capable of calling forth pit wyrms.”
“If I see any little men with wings, I’ll run,” Solon said.
“You’re mad,” Feir said. “Dorian, we need to leave. This kingdom’s doomed. They’ll capture Curoch; they’ll capture you, and then what hope will the rest of the world have? We need to pick a battle we can win.”
“Unless the God is with us, we won’t win any battles, Feir.”
“Don’t give me that God bullshit! I won’t let Solon take Curoch, and I’m taking you back to Sho’cendi. Your madness is taking you.”
“Too late,” Solon said. He scooped up the sword from the bed.
“We both know I can take that away from you,” Feir said.
“In a swordfight, sure,” Solon agreed. “But if you try to take it, I’ll just draw power through it and stop you. Like Dorian said, every meister within fifty miles will know we have an artifact here, and they’ll all come looking for it.”
“You wouldn’t,” Feir said.
Solon’s face took on an intensity Dorian hadn’t seen since he’d left Sho’fasti wearing his first blue robes. Now, as then, the slab of a man looked more like a soldier than like one of the foremost mages of the day. “I will do it,” Solon said. “I’ve given ten years of my life for this backwater, and they’ve been good years. It’s been damn good to stand for something rather than just watch from the side and criticize everyone who’s actually doing something. You should try it. You used to, you know? What happened to the Feir Cousat who went and took this sword in the first place? I’m going to do something here. Don’t spoil my chance to make it be useful. Come on, Feir, if we can fight Khalidor, how could we not?”
“Once you make your mind up, you’re about as easy to move as Dorian,” Feir said.
“Thank you,” Solon said.
“I didn’t mean it as a compliment.”