Avelmir was younger than Gerin, his round, smoothly shaved face smiling and open. His familiar, a fat gray lizard about a foot long, rested on the table in front of him. Its yellow eyes gave back Gerin's stare unwinkingly. When Avelmir stroked its scaly skin, it arched its back in pleasure.
Gerin told his story. When he was done, Avelmir's smile had quite gone. "You pose a difficult problem, sir baron, and one in which I am not sure we can render timely assistance. Let me consult here . . ." He glanced down at a scrap of parchment. "We are badly understaffed, as you must be aware, and I fear we shall be unable to send anyone truly competent north of the Kirs before, hmm, seventy-five to eighty days."
"What!" Gerin's bellow of outrage whipped heads around. "In that time I'll be dead, with my keep and most of the northland aflame for my pyre!"
Avelmir's manner grew chillier yet. "We find ourselves under heavy obligations in the near future, the nature of which I do not propose to discuss with you. If you do not care to wait for our services against your barbarous warlock, hire some northern bungler, and may you have joy of him. Good day, sir."
"You—" Outrage choked the Fox.
The battle-gleam kindled in Van's eyes. "Shall I break the place apart a bit, captain?"
"I would not try that," Avelmir said quietly.
"And why not?" Van tugged at his sword. It came halfway free, then struck. He roared a curse. Avelmir's hands writhed through passes. When Gerin tried to stop him, the reptilian familiar puffed itself up to twice its size and jumped at him. He drew back, not sure if it was venomous.
Sweat started forth on Van's forehead, and an instant later on Avelmir's. The outlander gained an inch, lost it again. Then more and more blade began to show. At last it jerked clear. With a howl of triumph, Van raised his sword arm.
Gerin grabbed it with both hands. For a moment, he thought he would be lifted off the floor and swung with the blade. But reason returned to Van's face. The outlander relaxed.
Avelmir had the look of a man who'd fished for minnows and caught a shark. Into the dead silence of the great chamber, he said, "We must see if a way can be found. Follow this."
A blue foxfire globe popped into being an inch in front of Gerin's nose. Startled, he took a step backwards. The foxfire hurried away, like a man on an important errand. Gerin and Van followed.
The ball of light led them down a steep spiral stairway into the bowels of the Collegium. Gerin's excitement grew; here, he knew, the potent sorceries were undertaken. When he was a student, he had been restricted to the upper floors. As the eerie guide led him down echoing corridors, he realized for the first time how much of the Collegium was underground—and how little he had understood its true extent.
He and Van passed doors without number. Most were shut; more than one bore runes of power to ensure it stayed so. Many of the open ones were innocuous: a smithy, a chamber in which glassblowers created vessels of curious shapes and sizes, a crowded library. But a winged, tailed demon thrashed within a pentacle in one room. It glared at the Fox with fiery eyes; its stench followed him down the hall.
"What do you suppose would happen if we didn't choose to follow our magical guide?" Van said.
"Nothing good, I'm sure."
The foxfire winked out in front of a closed door. Gerin knocked; there was no reply. He lifted the latch. The door silently swung open.
The chamber was far underground and held no lamps, but it was not dark. A soft silvery gleam which had no apparent source suffused it. Behind a curiously carven ebony table sat an old wizard who looked up from some arcane computation when the privacy of his cubicle was breached. His amber silk robes rustled as he moved.
He nodded to Gerin and Van. "If you need a name for me, call me Sosper." That was clearly a pseudonym, for he was no Sithonian. Though his phrases were polished, he spoke with a western accent; he must have been born somewhere on the long peninsula that jutted into the Orynian Ocean.
He smiled at Van. "No need to keep hand on hilt, my friend. It will avail you nothing, as I am no child in shaping spells of sealing." The outlander, confident as always in his own strength, tried to draw. His sword was frozen fast. Gerin would have believed Sosper without test; the man radiated power as a bonfire radiates heat.
Gentle but overwhelmingly self-assured, Sosper cut off the baron when he began to speak. "Why do you question Avelmir's judgment? I can give you no aid, nor can the Collegium, until the time he specified. What happens among barbarians is of little moment to us in any event, and less now. You may perhaps be able to deduce the reason, having once studied here. No, look not so startled, my young friend: who knows the chick better than the hen?"
Trying to master his surprise, Gerin turned his wits to the problem Sosper had set him. He found no solution, and said so.
"Do you not? A pity. In that case, there appears to be no need for further conversation. Leave me, I pray, so I may return to my calculations."
"At least tell me why you will not aid me," Gerin said. "Balamung is no ordinary mage; he has more power than any I've seen here."
For the first time, Sosper spoke with a touch of asperity. "I am under no obligation to you, sir; rather the reverse, for you take me away from important matters. And as for your Trokmê, I care not if he has the Book of Shabeth-Shiri—"
"He has. You don't seem to have listened to a word I said."
"How can you know this? Have you seen its terrible glow with your own eyes?" Sosper was skeptical, almost contemptuous.
"No, but I spoke with a woodsrunner who has."
"You accept the untrained observations of a savage as fact? My good man, a hundred generations of scriers have sought the Book of Shabeth-Shiri—in vain. I doubt a barbarian hedge-wizard could have found it where they failed. No, lost it is and lost it shall remain, until the one no grave shall hold brings it back to the world of men."
Gerin had not heard that bit of lore before. It chilled him to the marrow. But his protests died unspoken. The old man before him had been right for so long, and grown so arrogant in his rightness, that now he could not hear anything that contradicted his set image of the world. He was talented, brilliant . . . and deafened by his own rigidity.
"Leave me," Sosper said. It was order, not request. Followed close by Van, Gerin left the chamber. Ice was in his heart. The door swung closed behind them of its own accord. Like a faithful servant, the foxfire ball reappeared to guide them back to its creator.
On their return, Avelmir looked to be considering some remark at their expense, but Gerin's stony visage and an ominous twitch of Van's great forearm muscles persuaded him to hold his tongue.
"What now, captain?" the outlander asked as they left the Collegium.
Gerin shook his head in dejected bewilderment. "Great Dyaus above, how should I know? Every move I make rams my head into a stone walclass="underline" the Sibyl, Carus, now this. Maybe Balamung was right. Maybe I can do nothing to fight him. Still, I intend to go on trying—what else can I do? And I can do one thing for myself right now."
"What's that?"
"Get drunk."
Van slapped him on the back, sending him staggering down the steps. "Best notion I've heard in days. Where do we find a place?"
"It shouldn't be hard." Nor was it. Not five minutes' ride from the Collegium stood a small tavern, set between an apothecary's shop and an embalmer—"Where the druggist sends his mistakes, I suppose," Gerin said. He read the faded sign over the tavern door. "'The Barons' Roost.' Hah! Anything that roosted here would come away with lice in its feathers."