There were limitations. The stones lengthened sight but they did not sharpen hearing. You could catch the thief with his hand in somebody else’s purse, but you could not hear the patter of the mountebank three feet away; you could spot a gathering of conspirators met together in secret, but you could not hear them plotting. And with distance came lack of clarity: the images became like figures seen through water, flattened and distorted, their movements crablike and hideous. Moreover, the world was so wide it was almost impossible to locate any single person or any specific place within in, unless you had something—a strand of hair, a handful of soil, or a scrap of cloth—to bridge the gap. For that reason, each stone was linked in some way to a specific location, like the streets outside the King’s house in Pentheirie on Thäerie, or the town of Baillébachlain on Leal, below the wizards’ Scholia. The largest, the one she chose now, she used to spy on her subjects in Apharos and the surrounding towns and villages.
The sun was sinking. Little grey bats flittered outside the unglazed window, but they would not come in.
From this dizzy height, looking back from the promontory, the city was a shadowy landscape of spires, peak-roofed houses, and towers whose conical roofs as looked as sharp as thorns from above.
When she looked into the depths of the stone, the city and its inhabitants gradually became more distinct: tiny people in the market squares, the shops, and the gaudy palaces of the nobles. For a time, she allowed her attention to wander, spying out all the places where her people were gathered. And when her thoughts turned at last toward the man she sought, it did not take long for a bent grey figure to swim into view. Though his exact location was unclear—all she could see was wood and stone, dimly illuminated—now that she had found him she had only to watch his movements until he came to some other place that she could recognize. Ouriána felt a surge of satisfaction. Almost, it had been too easy.
Then something wiped it all away: the face, the figure, along with her satisfaction at finding him so easily.
It was the sort of resistance she had not experienced in years—in decades. She stepped back from the stone, the breath hissing through her teeth, her brain seething with indignation. Truly, it was too much: first that mum-show in the marketplace, the unrest he had fomented ever since, and now this!
She felt a momentary tremor of doubt, an unaccustomed pang of fear, wondering if the deity within might have abandoned her. Yet how could she suffer such a loss—a severing of flesh and spirit far greater than any mere death—and not know of it?
Swiftly, she cast off the woven silver that bound her hair, let the rich auburn tresses tumble down her back. She unclasped the gem-studded belt that girdled her waist and allowed it to fall to the floor. Rings and bracelets followed, until she stood there with no other adornment but her own beauty and raw power, with no net or chain or fetter to impose any limits.
Reaching deep inside, she eventually found what she was seeking: the Darkness coiled at the center of her being, the ancient thing that sometimes looked out through her eyes, that spoke to her with the dull booming of the tide or came to her with the cold salt smell of the ocean floor. It was still there. How could it ever leave her, when it was her second self?
Gradually, her panic subsided, her confidence returned; she knew herself a goddess. What had happened, she concluded, must be something quite different from what she had feared, some interference from outside. Yes, yes, that was surely it. It could not possibly be through any gift of his own that the old man defied her. There must be some person or entity far greater than he was, who for reasons yet obscure was protecting him. Indeed, it was probably a consortium of magicians, for there was no single mage or wizard of such power still living who was not in her thrall.
Once she had him, she would discover who was responsible, and destroy them too, one by one. She smiled to herself, once again sure of her power.
In a cave by the shore, not a league from the city wall, the object of her search waited, cold, cramped, and utterly miserable.
The cavern was a large one, the abode of smugglers. When the moon was dark, they regularly brought in shipments of illicit goods, but they also occasionally smuggled desperate men out of the country. At the moment, a number of boxes and bales occupied most of a narrow ledge running the length of the cavern.
During a low tide that ledge was dry; during a particularly high one it was apt to be submerged, as the presence of sand and shells attested. From the ledge, steps of water-rotten stone led down to an equally rotten wooden pier, where the smugglers moored their boats.
It was on the pier that Maelor sat, awaiting a man who had promised to aid his escape from the island. It was a risk to go out on the sea, which was Ouriána’s ally—of this he was well aware—but the island was hers, too, and her spies too numerous to count. In any case, he had grown weary of hiding, weary of the fear that hunted him day and night.
The cave was dank and dim, lit only by a pair of green glass lanterns. From the sea that light could easily be mistaken for the glow of phosphorous in marshy places along the shore. Dampness trickled like snails’
tracks down the rough stone walls. There were bones under the green water, for there was only the one entrance, and on certain days of the month the place became a death trap. In a rare moment of prescience, Maelor knew that someday soon one of the wild, lawless men who frequented the place would drown; with equal certainty he knew that any prediction of his would go unheeded.
Rather than waste his breath on warnings, he sat in the sickly light, scratching the waterlogged wood with a rusty knife over and over, creating the patterns that had obsessed him for all the years that he could remember: the same figures he had painstakingly formed of sticks and bones, or written in chalk, charcoal, and red paint on the walls, floor, and ceiling of his cluttered attic chamber.
He had performed the same useless and frustrating ritual a thousand times before. He expected nothing to come of it; it was merely habit—less than habit by now, it was mindless instinct. Yet his thoughts were swarming with strange fancies, with bright, many-colored shadows of realities that had been or might be; another identity and another life were struggling to emerge. The familiar exercise was a welcome distraction.
Maelor the Astromancer was a fabrication, not even his own, he had always known that much—but the real man had been buried for so long, the old juggler and sometime magician had never allowed himself to believe it might be possible to bring him back into the light. Now he was beginning to hope, and that hope terrified him, almost as much as the knowledge that Ouriána’s soldiers, Ouriána’s spies, were seeking him. Indeed, the two fears fed each other—because what if they should find him before he learned the truth?
As he gazed down, with a puzzled frown, at the symbols he had carved in the wood, something happened. Perhaps it was Ouriána’s probing, the brief touch of one powerful mind against another whose power was only latent, bright steel striking dull flint to make a spark and ignite a fire. However it came about, the spark was lit and cold ashes stirred to life.
The slap of water against rotting pylons gradually receded, along with the rumbling voices of the men loading the boats. In a growing excitement, he drew a new line here, scratched out another there. The symbols began to make sense—why had he not recognized them before? They were runes, images of power that wizards studied and used in their spells.
A sudden trembling came over him, and the words seemed to speak themselves: “Duenin. Désedh. Güwelen. Theroghal.”
As soon as he named the runes aloud, all that had been confused and mysterious became orderly and familiar in his mind. A whole train of memories trooped through his brain until he knew his entire history, both before and after the disaster that had changed him so grievously; he knew his name and the purpose that had driven him. And with that knowledge, power welled up inside of him, filling him from the soles of his feet to his fingertips, to the roots of the hair on his head. He buried his face in his hands and wept for joy.