THE COURT POET OF KHARKANAS DEPARTED THE CHAMBER, AND in the silence that followed, it
seemed to Rise Herat that Gallan had taken with him every possible word, every conceivable thought. Sorcery still roiled about in the room, heavy and sinuous as smoke from a brazier. Cedorpul, seated on a bench that lined one wall, had leaned his back against the worn tapestry behind him, closing his eyes. Endest Silann, sallow despite the ebon hue of his skin, sat on the edge of the old dais, his hands cupped in his lap and his eyes fixed upon them with peculiar expectancy.
Standing opposite the doorway through which Gallan had departed, Lord Silchas studied the swirls of magic that still drifted above the tiled floor. His arms were crossed, his features fixed and without expression.
‘The Court of Mages,’ said Cedorpul, his eyes still closed. ‘Well, it was a bold ambition.’
Rise Herat rubbed at his face, but everything seemed strangely numb to his touch, as if he was no more than an actor upon some stage, truths hidden behind thick makeup, while he stumbled through a play constructed of lies and penned by a fool.
‘Why does it still linger?’ Silchas asked.
‘Slipped the tether,’ Endest Silann replied after a moment, squinting down at his hands. ‘He left it to wander like a lost child.’
Silchas turned to the young priest. ‘His reason?’
‘To prove the conceit,’ Cedorpul answered when it became obvious that Endest would not. ‘That we can control this power. That we can shape it to our will. It is as elusive as darkness itself, a thing that cannot be grasped. The Terondai bleeds this … stuff. It fills every room in the Citadel. It commands the courtyard and stalks the streets beyond.’ He finally opened his eyes, revealing their red-shot exhaustion, and met Silchas’s stare. ‘Have you seen where it gathers, milord? About statuary, the monuments of the city’s squares, the caryatids shouldering the lintel stones of our proud public edifices. Around tapestries. In the taverns where bards sing and pluck their instruments.’ He waved a plump hand. ‘As if it possessed eyes and ears, and the ability to touch, or, perhaps, taste.’
‘The one you would make seneschal to this Court of Mages,’ said Silchas, baring his teeth, ‘simply flings it all back into your face, Cedorpul.’
‘It is his manner to mock our aspirations. A poet who ran out of words. An awakener of sorcery with nothing to say.’
‘How did he come by this power? To awaken the darkness?’
Endest snorted, and then said, ‘Forgive me, milord. He found the power in his words. In the rhythms, the cadences. Unmindful, he discovered that he was capable of uttering … holiness. Needless to say,’ Endest added, attention returning once more to his cupped hands, ‘the discovery offended him.’
‘Offended?’ Silchas prepared to say more, but then, with a helpless gesture, he swung round and walked to a sideboard where stood a large clay jar of wine. He poured full a goblet, and, without turning to face the others, he said, ‘And you, Cedorpul? How did you come by it?’
‘Could I answer you thus, I would be a relieved man.’
‘Thus?’
‘By prayer, milord, as befits a priest serving a goddess.’
Silchas drank down a mouthful, and then said, ‘If not born of the sacred, Cedorpul, then describe to me what mundane gesture enlivened the magic?’
‘Curiosity, milord, but not mine. The sorcery itself.’
Silchas spun round. ‘Then it lives? It possesses a will of its own? Darkness as sorcery, now manifest in our realm. What does it want of us?’
‘Milord,’ said Cedorpul, ‘none can say. There is no precedent.’
Silchas faced Rise Herat. ‘Historian? Have you perused the most ancient tomes, the mouldy scrolls and clay tablets and whatnot? Is there or is there not, here in the Citadel, the gathered literature of our people? Are we indeed in a time without precedent?’
A time without precedent? Oh, surely we are in such a time. ‘Milord, there are many myths recorded in our library, mostly musing on origins of various things. They seek to map an unknown realm, and where memory does not survive, then imagination serves.’ He shook his head. ‘I would not put much trust in the veracity of such efforts.’
‘Use what you will of them nonetheless,’ Silchas commanded, ‘and speculate.’
Rise Herat hesitated. ‘Imagine a world without sorcery—’
‘Historian, we are in the midst of its burgeoning, not its extinction.’
‘Then, in principle, magic is not in question. It exists. It has, perhaps, always existed. What, then, has changed? A burgeoning, you say. But consider our own creation myths, our tales of the Eleint, the dragons born of sorcery, and indeed the guardians of the same. In the distant past, if we give such tales any credence at all, there was magic in the world, beyond even what we see now. As a force of creation, perhaps, an ordering of chaotic powers and, possibly, emerging with the necessity of a will behind that ordering. Shall we call this a faceless god?’
‘And there,’ interjected Cedorpul in a weary tone, ‘is where you stumble, historian. Who created the creator? Whence the divine will that engendered divine will? The argument devours its own tail.’
‘And in that myth,’ Rise Herat said, ignoring Cedorpul, ‘many are made as one, and one as many. Tiamatha, the dragon of a thousand eyes, a thousand fanged jaws. Tiamatha, who makes from her subjects her own flesh.’ He paused, and then shrugged. ‘Too many of these oldest of stories invoke the same notions. The Dog-Runners will sing of the Witch of Fires, from whose womb every child is delivered, even as she dwells in each flicker of flame. Again, one who is many.’
Cedorpul made a disgusted sound. ‘Dog-Runners. Abyss take us, historian. They also tell of a sleeping world, earth as flesh, water as blood, and every creature but a conjuration of the sleeper’s dreaming.’