It had been a sunny enough morning. The light cloud that had covered the sky at dawn had been blown away by a fresh breeze from the north-west, leaving clear blue skies, a gently warming sun and the ever-roiling and growing shadow.
The fifteen soldiers and three mages of the monitoring party in Parve had chosen for themselves one of the grand houses that lay just off the central square. It was a large, two-storey building with rooms enough for each to be shared by just two men. A well-stocked pantry and cellars, partly harvested from other nearby dwellings, made living comfortable. But not too comfortable.
Each of the men who had volunteered for the duty was aware that they were unlikely to see the Colleges again. Between them and home lay the entire Wesmen invading armies and the Blackthorne Mountains. Above them, the rip to the dragon Dimension posed unguessable threat, and in the dead city they knew that not everyone was dead.
Outside of the billet, the platoon officer, Jayash, forbade them to walk in groups of less than three. Mages had to have two guards each. Patrols leaving the relative sanctuary of the square were always six strong with a mage in support. The streets weren’t safe.
Not that they had actually seen anyone. But the sounds were there. The echo of a footstep, the slap of a door on a windless day, the hurried scrabbling of hand in dirt, the ghost of a voice carried on the breeze. Some, probably acolytes, had escaped Darrick’s net. Parve was an eerie place.
It was approaching noon on the eleventh day of measurement. Having long since calculated the rate of increase of the noon shade and the dimensions of Parve, it was now a question of monitoring, of completing the chart each day, of checking for errors and watching the sky.
No one had actually said it but they were the early warning system of another dragon attack. An attack they would not be expected to survive.
Jayash and three soldiers watched while the duty mages prepared the ground for the day’s measurement. Inside an area covering almost a thousand paces on its long side, and seven hundred on its shorter, the paving of the central square had eight lines of metal spikes driven in to its surface. Each line represented a compass point and the distance between each spike and their progression towards the edges of the square marked the expansion of the shadow.
Jayash strolled around the perimeter of the marked area as the shadow moved across the ground, a monstrous blot on the earth that sent shivers through his body and cooled the fledgling warmth of the day.
Turning in the area, he walked along one line and back down another, noting the distance between each peg. It was not an exact science, of course. If the cloud was heavy, the shadow’s edge was more indistinct and inevitably there was error.
He paused at the end of the second line he’d tracked, the one representing south-east, frowning. The final two spikes seemed a little further from their adjacent cousins than the rest, like the line was becoming stretched. He glanced left and right. If his eyes didn’t deceive him, the pattern was repeated in the south and east lines.
‘Delyr?’ he called. The Xeteskian looked up from his conversation with Sapon, a Dordovan colleague.
‘Jayash.’
‘Have we had a problem the last couple of days?’
Delyr shrugged. ‘Not really. We’ve seen what is a significant but probably small acceleration of the rate of shadow increase but some of it has to be to do with cloud effect blurring the edge of the shade.’ He glanced up into the sky, blue but for the rip overhead.
‘Today we’ll know.’
Jayash nodded. ‘But you’ve known of this possible problem for a couple of days.’
‘Five actually. Look, I appreciate your desire to be told every minute detail, but in scientific terms, it was not worth mentioning, so I didn’t.’
‘But today.’
Delyr smiled thinly. ‘You will receive instant assessment followed by a full report. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, time is short.’ He gestured at the rip and the shadow at the base of the pyramid that was all but gone.
Jayash waved a hand vaguely and stepped back to watch. Delyr and Sapon trotted around the edge of the spike field, leaving a peg lying at the end of each line. Both mages then walked briskly to the base of the pyramid and knelt close to the sun shade marker, a long piece of polished wood fixed to the ground where the pyramid’s east wall met the earth. When the last vestiges of natural shadow had left it, the measurements were made.
It was a good enough system but, Jayash considered, it had a flaw. At present, the shade was relatively small and the pyramid close. The movement of the sun between the moment the mages agreed it was noon and the measurement of the shade was negligible.
But soon, the pyramid would be covered by the rip’s shadow and the agreement of noon would have to be made more distantly. What was more, the area of the shade, growing larger, would mean more time to make the measurements.
He could foresee, firstly, all his men being co-opted into taking readings rather than securing lives and later, a hopelessly inaccurate measurement, leaving The Raven with a margin of error that ran into days. Delyr seemed oblivious. He alone still thought he was going home once the rate of increase of the shade had been clearly established.
He didn’t realise he’d been marked as a martyr, not a hero.
It was noon. Delyr and Sapon straightened and walked quickly back towards the spikes. The rip hung in the air, waiting, its shadow wide and clear, uncluttered by the fog of cloud, its edges hard and distinct.
Swiftly and without conversation, the two mages took up opposite positions, north and south, and began their task, leaning close to the ground to gauge the exact end of the shade and the beginning of light. Once satisfied, they placed spikes in their marks and, with small iron mallets, drove them into the earth beneath the paving of the square. Moving around the compass points anti-clockwise, they repeated the operation in less than five minutes.
Jayash could see the mages’ consternation immediately, saw the anxious glance they exchanged and began walking towards them. Delyr and Sapon met by the south line and measured the distance the new spike sat from yesterday’s using both a length of carefully marked rope and a carved length of rod-straight wood in which they made two marks. In this way they took readings from three points before Delyr consulted a parchment he fetched from a leather bag lying on the ground.
‘What is it?’ asked Jayash but he knew the answer already.
‘Just a moment,’ said Delyr. He and Sapon scribbled on the parchment, re-took their measurements and entered the figures in the log. Delyr looked up.
‘Instant assessment?’ suggested Jayash.
‘We’re in deep trouble.’
‘Justification?’
‘We’ll check again tomorrow but the rate at which the shade is growing is increasing. It’s not stable, or doesn’t appear to be.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning the bigger it gets, the faster it grows.’
Jayash pushed his tongue into the inside of a cheek. ‘So, time is shorter than you originally calculated.’
‘Yes, much,’ said Delyr. ‘And we have no way of knowing whether the rate of increase will continue to rise. I suspect that it will.’
‘So what’s the new estimate?’
‘Yes, hold on . . .’ Delyr looked at Sapon who had been writing furiously. He underlined a figure on the parchment and handed it to Delyr, whose eyes widened.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Sapon nodded. ‘I’ll refine it later but it’s not far away from accurate.’
‘Well, before, we had thirty days before the rip covered Parve. We now have eight.’
Jayash said nothing, just stood at the rip above, shuddered and imagined the dragons pouring through.
It was the longest night of Ilkar’s life. Between them, The Unknown and Denser set a direct course across Triverne Inlet, using the stiffening breeze to drive them on a single tack towards the meeting of water and the Blackthorne Mountains on the eastern side of the Inlet. At least the Xeteskian was making good on his desire to learn to sail. Further out into the expanse of tidal sea, the swell deepened, making the quiet choppiness near the shore a distant memory. The small boat, never in danger under the stewardship of its dual skippers, pitched and yawed through the swell but made good headway, sail taut and full.