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RHION WOKE WITH A START, froe Market in the City of Circles: a plump little dandy in a red velvet doublet whose buttons flashed with rubies and to whose carefully dressed brown curls clung the scent of cloves Blue and yellonings flapped in the bright spring sunlight around the ancient bridge-temple of Bran Rhu The air was thick with the se below Rhion was thuh the old pieces of broken books piled in a used-paper seller&039;s barrow: fragments of romances and hymnals, their illuminations faded and yellowed like desiccated leaves; scrolls of religion and philosophy with their glue cracking along the joins; old household receipt books; and the accounts of forgotten ns The lowest of kitchen slaves would co and would look at that modishly dressed youth with curiosity and suspicion in their eyes Rhion, even as he exareen accordion-fold book from the unknown south, tried to formulate in his mind so of the kind - should one of his fashionable friends see hih

A shadow had fallen over hi, Rhion saw him for the first time

But this time - he had dreamed this scene before - Jaldis looked as he did now His face was thin and gray under the stringy web of his beard, his white hair no thicker than spider-floss in the sunlit breeze The threadbare blankets and worn black cloak which wrapped him parted to reveal the voice-box strapped to his breast, and its silvery drone was all the voice that Rhion heard

No! he thought, hisshreds of the deep, inally framed those words No, he&039;s not like that! He wasn&039;t like that, not then! His hair and beard were still mostly brown, he still had his eyes then, dark and luminous and kind

But his e of him as he had been, nor the sound of his voice

As he had indeed done on that day of glassy sunlight and intoxicating flower-scents so o, Jaldis reached into the paper seller&039;s barrow and brought out a book

But instead of the few pages of star lore and mathematics that it had actually been, it was a book with black covers, covered with dust and sticky with cobweb The air around it seeht shuddering like a heat dance, and when Rhion opened it, what he held in his hands was not a book at all Only darkness lay contained in those black covers, a darkness which dropped away into a hole of inky nothing between his hands As he stared at it in horror, the Abyss exploded upward around hi; a darkness filled with colors that should not have been colors, gouging a hollow in air and light and in all sane things as if the world which he knew hadflame Airless beyond comprehension, cold as he had never understood cold could be, the darkness opened around hi hi him

He was falling His cry was silent

Then he found hie of abefore him, croith three ancient stones Two had fallen and lay nearly buried in the thick, calf-deep grass; the third still reared its worn head against the azure well of the suht - the air was laden with the peep of frogs, crinkled with the trilling of crickets, and su banner beyond the black spikes of the surrounding pines

The thick sweetness caught at his throat as he waded through the grass, up the hill to the stones His feet hewed a dark swathe through the dew that glittered in the starlight, a shadowed track leading back into the coagulated gloo over his shoulder, he felt a kind of panic, a terror of pursuit fear of being traced here, captured, taken Taken where? The thought of it turned hi, no reason for that hideous dread

But if he could reach the stones, he&039;d be safe If he could reach theht, he could escape

Escape?

Jaldis His s in the disorientation of the dream Where&039;s Jaldis in all this? He can&039;t run, he&039;s crippled He won&039;t be able to get away froht of capture turned hi up on one fallen stone Around hirass of the le dark line of his tracks Overhead the sky was a gloell of blue, an invertedhis ar stars to hiht

But as he turned he saw all around hilitter of silver and steel, the closing ring of eyes

He jolted froht His heart was pounding with panic, and for one terrible second he knew that he had not escaped Waking had only postponed the knowledge of ould happen to him next but only momentarily They would capture him and and

But it was only darkness

Only a drea to slow his heart and still his panic The cold killing lust of the hunters, the poisoned fog of impersonal hate

But those did not fade froer than before, and he realized that those, at least, were real

Rhion dropped his hand from beneath the covers to where he had left his spectacles on the floor by the bed His wizard&039;s sight let hiht, but without his spectacles what he saw, day or night, was only a blur The ainst his temples and for a lass The roo winter night, when the heat of the banked fires in the kitchen far below no longer warht for warmth beneath their few blankets and both their shabby cloaks, Jaldis still slept; around them, the little rooone to bed On the shelf above the bed Jaldis&039; opal spectacles stared unwinkingly into darkness; the rosewood soundbox rested like a sleeping turtle in its sparkling nest of taliser

And it was co his eyes, Rhion slowed the panic froht hio and as he had practiced daily inhis senses to the somnolent city outside

He became immediately aware of the crunch of e At the sa of fear redoubled, and he understood then that it was co to him from one of the wizard&039;sthe inn

In none of the Forty Realms was it considered a criods Bran Rhu, Agon, Kithrak, and Thisme considered such an activity an act of od&039;s favor or pro on the cult, and Rhion had been a wizard long enough and had talked to enough of his professional colleagues on the subject, to have a healthy wariness about settling down to sleep

For this reason, within the first week ofInn, Rhion had draizard&039;s ns imbued with a trace of his personal power - on house walls, fountain railings, and doorposts in a loose ring, perhaps half aat its center, e number of people with that particular species of determined, impersonal hatred in their hearts

It was far fro system, of course Wizard&039;s marks had to be renewed periodically - Rhion&039;s more frequently than Jaldis&039; would have to be, because of Rhion&039;s lesser strength - and were by no means accurate in what stirred them to life Time after time Rhion had been called from his meditations, frohts, ry mob of local fishwives out to storm the house of a particularly unpopular , for daas at most two hours away - it was more likely that the problem was some kind of drunken brawl

But still, Rhion slipped from beneath the covers and, breathless with cold, hastily pulled on his robe over the knitted pullover and hose he&039;d worn to bed and laced up his boots His father had been a man with a motto for every occasion - "Better to be safe than sorry," had been one of his favorites Having seen just how sorry it was possible to beco to opt for an uncomfortable safety every ti, and Rhion hadn&039;t the heart to take his cloak fro swiftly, his breath a trail of white behind hi long enough to work the bolt back into place by ic behind him in case someone tried to break in while Jaldis was still lost in his exhausted sluh the inn, areneralized sleep-spell as he hurried down the elliptical spiral of the steps, not sure whether he was getting the spell right or whether it orking It was one he hadn&039;t practiced lately, and half his er that had - he was ale kitchen, low-ceilinged, shuttered, silent, and dark but for the feeble glow of the banked ereen cloak fro it around his shoulders Outside the noise was clearer - definitely arry men, definitely headed this way

He paused on the threshold, panting, to collect his droughts It still took hih he practiced diligently, and Jaldis told hiainst the rising shiver in his breast, the inner clamor of There isn&039;t ti, and reaching out with all the senses of wizardry, realized that the mark the mob had passed was the one he&039;d put on the side of a little shrine of Shilrain, over on the corner of Sow Lane

Clutching the landlord&039;s cloak about hih alleyways choked with half-frozen garbage and no wider than the span of his arms As he ran he shoved resolutely fro to heave to its surface like porridge on the boil, questions like Who&039;s behind this? and Where the hell can we go? The landlord&039;ll never bolt the door against the a spell to cloak hiht very well know him for the wizard&039;s apprentice Unlike the sleep-spells at the inn, tossed hastily about him like a sower&039;s seeds, this one had better keep hi to choose between a very severe beating - if nothing worse - and soer further mob violence In situations like this it was axiomatic that the wizard - or the wizard&039;s friends and acquaintances - could never really win

The , though its core of two dozen men in the dark-blue livery of so added to all the time by the kind of tavern idlers and day laborers who could always be counted upon to join an affray Rhion recognized two of thethem and a couple of lesser officials of the local Te in Felsplex One of these was yelling so about servants of evil and insulters of the na certainty about whose honor this assee was in

Nevertheless he fell into step with one of the local wastrels, a little fe frequently in the Black Pig Hoping his spell of Who-Me? would hold, he asked, "What&039;s going on?"

The wolanced at him A torch in one hand, an ax-handle in the other, she appeared to be - and, by the workings of the spell, in fact was -an eye on the thickly quilted back of the liveried bravo in front of her If later challenged to describe the man who had spoken to her, she would have been able only to arrive at a vague recollection of soht and build "Gonna kill theaps in her teeth into the frozen sewage underfoot

The word she used for "kill" was fruge, a verb which had application only to animals, almost a technical ter whichand which demanded no explanations - a self-evident axioe a rat, or a cow for beef One did it because that hat one did with rats and cows

"Yeah?" Rhion said in the local slang, and wiped his nose on his sleeve "What&039;d the bastards do this time?"

"Sold a love-potion to that whore wife of Tepack theher husband&039;s partner&039;s innocent son into bed with her" His companion nodded toward the solid core of liverymen, like a knot of lead poured into a wooden club toweapon "Only sixteen, he is, and his daddy - Lord Pruul - says he&039;s gonna fruge theonna let anyone say a word against his wife"